This Week in Tech 1022 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for TWIT this week in tech. Mike Elgin is here, devendra Hardawar, lou Maresca amazing, they all showed up even though we set the clocks forward last night. We'll talk about ending daylight saving time. We'll also talk about low-Earth orbit satellites, very low-Earth orbit satellites. What are they going to use those for? And Apple delaying Smart Siri Again. All all that more coming up next on twit podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit.

00:43
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1022, recorded Sunday, march 9th 2025. Chatting with Mr Babyman, it's time for TWIT, the show where we get together with some of my favorite people and talk about the week's tech news. This is like an old home week, like my favorite people are here I mean, you know, it's always my favorites, I guess. But Devendra Hardwar on the left there. Hi, devendra, good to see you.

01:18 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Hello, happy to be here Running away from the kids to talk about that.

01:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you locked the door kids to talk about. Yeah, you lock the door. Yep, yeah, senior editor at engadget, it's good to see you. You've got the uh, some sort of lego, uh, garden growing behind you. I got a lego I got the one of the mario sets lego mario yeah, it lights up too it's fun. Oh my god, that's so cute. I just I see mario and the mushroom and wow, that's so cool. Nice to to see you, devendra, there's always something going on Good to see you good to be here.

01:45
yeah, also, a former host of this Week in Enterprise Tech and current engineering manager at Microsoft, lou Maresca, is here, hi.

01:54 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Lou. Hi Leo. Yeah, I'm running away from AI today, that's what I'm doing.

01:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there's a lot of AI going on. It's in the air, so to speak. I'm wearing my AI pin that records all these conversations and then at the end of the day, says you had a great time. It's really kind of silly, but what the hell, you know, it's fun. Also here, mike Elgin. He's in Oaxaca right now on the roof of bull link, the French famous French bakery. Is that the famous oaxaca cathedral? Over your left shoulder, right shoulder there?

02:29 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
no, that's a different cathedral that I'm looking over to my right, the famous cathedral, and then back there's another beautiful, another cathedral, centuries old cathedral. Yeah, this, this place has got a million of them and it's uh, it's really, really nice. You know, it's funny because oaxaca is one of the best cities in the world for French pastries, and I'm serious about that. They have some of the best croissants and baguettes in the world.

02:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oaxaca is one of the best cities in the world for food in general. It's really a food mecca. Yes, and we went down there with you and Amira as part of your gastronome, had trips and I just I'll never forget it was incredible, incredible food and a good time.

03:06
We were there for the day of the dead, so that was a party we probably made your drink more mezcal than you wanted to drink yes, that was the law that's actually my only complaint too much mezcal. Uh, it's good, it's good you actually have your. I still have a bottle of the Elgin miscal that you gave us. Uh, I'm just, I'm saving it. Does it get better with age?

03:32 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
uh, I wouldn't know, how would I know?

03:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
good answer, uh, mike is here, uh, from Mexico, where the clocks did not change last night. Yeah, so he's fully rested. Lou and davendra and I are are missing an hour's uh hour of sleep it's rough, it's rough it.

03:54
you know it's rough, and what's interesting is there's been all these movements. Now president trump and elon musk are both saying they want to eliminate the change, but I have to point out that Trump's been saying that since his last presidency, so why don't he do it? Well, it's more complicated. Two thirds of Americans 62 percent want to end the time change. But the problem is well, do you want to stay with daylight saving time or do you want to be standard time? And there's no agreement there at all.

04:29 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Let me raise another related issue of which there'll be even less agreement, which is that I think I personally think that we should all be in Greenwich meantime. Globally, if we can, we should all be on the same clock, because we really live in a ridiculously phrased global world.

04:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um yeah, what is this slavish devotion to sunshine?

04:51 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I mean, if you look at the, if you look at pilots right, pilots have to fly from one time zone to another, and so they've always been in what they call zulu time, which is greenwich meantime, and, just like pilots, all of us are now living in a whole world, and these time zones don't mean anything anymore. So we should all be like pilots and just use Greenwich Mean Time, that is a radical suggestion.

05:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The whole issue and the reason people don't agree about saving time versus standard time is the sunlight issue.

05:20 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Right, but that's just an association. It's, like you know, at at noon it's supposed to be brightly lit, but it's, like you know, that's not true necessarily in the winter in the in the north pole, and it varies you know what happened mike people would.

05:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If, if we all went to utc which, by the way, this clock behind me says it's 21, 20 utc, we all went to UTC then schools would stop using the clock and they'd say it'd be like going back to the Middle Ages, when the sun is, yay, high over the horizon, cometh thee to school yeah, bring back sundials.

05:58 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I say bring back, not gonna say uh swatch at internet, time right beat, time right watch beat time Swatch beat time That'll solve all of it.

06:07 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
You still would always have this cognitive load, though. When we have meetings with China or India, I still have to figure out is it their morning, is it their evening? I think that would make it harder. I think Because, again, it's all about the sun, it's all about the time of the day, and I think it's still going to work nine to five UTC, right Exactly, whereas I probably more properly nine to 17 UTC, which doesn't scan.

06:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It makes a terrible song, but that's in the middle of the night for you, so it's not. It's not ideal.

06:40 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I feel like our apps and services just have to do a better job. Like I know, scheduling meetings, often they're like this person's in another time zone. Watch out for when you're timing this. But hey, we get up this morning.

06:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
our phones should just tell us hey, by the way, clocks move forward or something. Yeah, they don't. It's a shame, they don't. It's weird, they do it, I mean automatically look at everything behind me is automatically fixed itself.

07:00 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
We have a weird system for keeping time because the weeks and the days and the months and the years are all based on where the planet is and then when we get into the clock and the time of the day, then oh, it depends on where you are and it's really. I just really think it would be a trivial adjustment, especially for younger people who get used to it. I mean, look at the adjustment they'd already made. Kids can't tell the time from a clock. They need a digital clock so they can see the truth. Very quickly adjust that.

07:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, we get up and go to school at 10 30 pm did you all have in kindergarten likea clock with the hands moved so you could practice telling time. Okay, so, world still Lou your kids and oh yeah, defender is your kid in kindergarten yet no she has my daughter sophia's in kindergarten.

07:48 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, we're doing the clock thing. Yeah, so they do the clock thing. They still do tell you. I don't know if the school's doing it, but we're doing it yeah, ah, some, yeah.

07:56 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Who knows what the schools are doing? They're definitely doing not cursive right and not doing cursive writing but not doing cursive anymore but even, even with the system, some people are on the 12 hours and then 12 more hours. Some people are on the 24-hour clock. So we already don't agree about what the numbers are yeah, I'm sick of subtracting 12.

08:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's too much. Or adding it's too much trouble. Why are we adding?

08:16 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
it. That's why I didn't join the military. I don't have time to learn something like that. What's this?

08:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Zulu all all about. So health experts you may not like this say that actually standard time is better for us. It best aligns with the sun in our natural circadian rhythms. So the problem is summertime now we're. We're on summertime now, and maybe that's why this spring move ahead. Besides, losing an hour's sleep is also a cause for more heart. Tomorrow there'll be more heart attacks, more car accidents when people get up and go to work, um, although does anybody still get up and go to work?

08:55 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
that's another again, the problem is the change, not the. Not that it's one, I think, so it's just but it is about changing it yeah, we just stopped.

09:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, what did mexico do?

09:04 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
they just said no more, we're yeah, I, I, I don't know, but the time stayed the same here and yeah, I think last year.

09:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They decided, and they, they. This is the problem there is a standard time zone, which is standard time, so they undoubtedly just, for instance, in california and many other states, we have voted to move to saving daylight, saving time, summertime as you call it in the in europe. Right, but you can't do that without, without a federal mandate, because it's our, it's changing our, our time zone and, by the way, all the computers are going to get mightily confused if we stop. Oh yeah, yeah, what a mess. So everything in your house, though, changes automatically.

09:54 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's one thing that's helped. I mean, like a microwave, the unconnected devices, the car.

09:58 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
the little thing on the car doesn't change for many cars Really the little digital readout of the time you've got to go in there and like how do you do this again?

10:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you many cars?

10:05 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
really the little digital readout of the time you got to go in there and like gps I mean what kind of cars are you driving?

10:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a?

10:11 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
toyota prius. It's an obscure brand but you have a gps in it, right uh well, there's digital services that you have to pay for, that I don't pay, so I I get the time that I pay for, which is the wrong time.

10:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You gotta pay more to get the right time. Yeah, believe it or not, my oven the cooking oven even is internet connected. I went downstairs and it was right. It's the only the microwave, and that's probably because I haven't yet put it on the internet.

10:40 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Come to think of it, yeah, I mean, one of the benefits of using the, the creators app from sony is that it automatically changes the the time on my camera, my dslr sony, oh wow. And so I travel all around the world and when I forget to change the time when I used to forget to change the time then when I put all the photos from my phone and other devices into an album, they're like way off right. So now they're all synchronized because of that app. So that's a that's a nice feature.

11:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Use the app if you have a sony so, according to fast company and uh the dr muhammad adil rishi, the author of the? Uh american medical associations or no, I'm sorry the american academy of sleep medicine a real expert published in the journal of clinical sleep medicine, permanent standard time is the optimal choice for health and safety and apparently research backs that up. The one hour change disrupts the body's well. We know that natural sleep cycle twice a year um daylight saving time transitions, particularly the one we had last night, lead to spikes in heart attacks and traffic.

11:49 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
We should all follow the science. Leo Follow the science which says that we need one time, one time set, not daylight savings time. But the other thing that science says and this is fairly recent science is that you should get up in the morning, go outside so you have exposure to sunlight. Yes, Guzzle some strong coffee, yeah, and stop drinking coffee like for the rest of the day.

12:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if you what that does is it kills your body. Okay, yeah.

12:14 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It sets the biorhythm every day with the light and the coffee, and that's optimal health, all optimal health.

12:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that what you're doing right now, mike?

12:22 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
no, no, I'm drinking coffee all day. Yeah, I don't have time for science. I have. I have things to write and so in in, uh, in 2023.

12:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Little Marco Rubio, uh, sponsored the 2023 Sunshine Protection Act. Oh, come on, he is from Florida, I guess, so that's okay, uh it. It passed unanimously in the Senate, wow, but didn't pass the house because lawmakers couldn't agree on whether standard or saving time is the permanent oh for sake. So there is a bill. It's stalled um. And of course there's the problem of hawaii and arizona, which don't in fact change their clock right makes me want to stand up and wave my cane. Yeah, it really does like representative green uh anyway, we're stuck with it.

13:24
Uh, trump has tweeted, as has musk, but I don't think a tweet has the force of law yet although that's laws, leo, come on. Well, that's probably I don't think an executive order can do it. I, I, I don't know, though, who knows it'll.

13:40 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
There's a president care we're close yeah.

13:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How do they feel in Mexico about the Gulf of America, mike? Are they uh?

13:48 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
people are just shrug. I I don't, you know. I think we all know that as soon as Trump is gone, it'll go right back. Yeah, I mean they, they. The thing people don't realize is the Gulf of America was named before North America was called America. Back when it was named the Gulf of America, north America was called Terra Incognita and the Spanish New Spain didn't even exist. Yet it predates Mexico as a country. Just to change that willy-nilly is just the most anti-historical, as is changing the clocks twice a year.

14:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, we only started doing that in World War II. I mean, this is not like written in stone, all right. Well, let's get rid of it. You know, I do this story every twice every year because I am. No one wants it, but everybody's got it. That's what's so weird, right? Yeah, yep, it's one of those things we just can't.

14:41 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
You can say that about a lot of things, leo, at this point.

14:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess that's true.

14:44 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Leo, you and I are alone in being old enough to remember when this was a big deal in the 70s, when carter, I think it was, was like oh yeah, this is great because we'll save energy ecology. Now, leo, and uh, you know they, they had all these stats not about health but about because people weren't as obese and unhealthy in the 70s and but they cared about the you know energy usage. Right, so you use less energy because of this and that was the whole reason and so everybody's like well, if it saves energy, then I guess we can accept it doesn't but now, like you can.

15:12
You can recycle and save all the energy you want and turn off the lights when you leave the bathroom, and then ai companies come in and use planets worth of energy to give us hallucinatory.

15:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, that's a good point. I didn't even think about that. So now that we are wasting energy like crazy, let's fix the clock. We've all accepted it.

15:30 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It is truly hilarious because when I was growing up in school, climate change was also a thing we were talking about the whole of the ozone layer. I remember reading about that in school.

15:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We fixed that. Did you know that?

15:41 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We fixed it.

15:45 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It was a whole thing. We got together and we fixed it, and now I think Elon Musk just fired all the people who fixed it.

15:48 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Anyway, sorry, but yeah. But now everything is coming to a head. We know climate change is going to lead to some radical changes to the planet. We're doing nothing. We're, in fact, accelerating the opposite. So you know, humanity has just gotten more and more disappointing. I've gotten older to be. We're always, we've always been that way.

16:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Come on, just a lot dumber, I'd say, but I don't think so, that's me, I don't think so. There was a collective madness happening, you know. So, yeah, well, just to re, just to reassure everybody, I've done a little looking into this. It's, it's always been this way.

16:21 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
There's, there's been plenty of crazy times, plenty of them, but not when we're so hyper connected and not when like that's what's different one rich dude can like basically start to collapse the american government which will take decades to fix. What he breaks now will take forever to fix.

16:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know it's definitely worse than before I do actually have a story, uh, about that. Somewhere mit uh media review had a really good, or what is it called? Mit technology review had a really good article about how uh the problem with defunding science is it takes decades to get back.

17:04 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
You know we're basically damaging stuff decades into the future well, the other thing is that a lot of the early um forced retirements are from people who've been with the government for less than two years, and the assumption, the ignorant assumption, the false assumption, is that, oh, these are just dispensable people who haven't gained enough experience to really matter, and all that stuff. But no, no, those people who are in the first two years of government work are the end result of painstaking, difficult recruitment efforts to secure young people.

17:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're the future.

17:39 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Convince them to work in government instead of going to Wall Street and making money and all this kind of stuff. It was so hard to get these people into government and now we're just like out you go throw away.

17:49 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's also like, uh, was it the transitionary people or what they were saying? Like the specific people they were targeting, it's also people who were working for the government, who have moved into new roles right and are in that also time their probation, their probation period.

18:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But the reason they're not new you can fire them more easily, that's all.

18:07 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's just they're easy to fire so anyway, china is basically going to rule the world for the next 100 years and we're just like we'll just take a step back, we're just giving it all up. Basically, very stupid oh, I'm optimistic.

18:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I well, here's, here's an optimistic view.

18:21 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Here's an optimistic view about all this. The malaise that was affecting our political system over the last few decades was indifference. Nobody paid attention to government, what it was doing, nobody cared, nobody voted All this kind of stuff. And now that the federal government is being dismantled and our alliances are being destroyed and all these other things that are happening, suddenly we are getting an education in how things work. Happening suddenly we are getting an education in how things work. And so we're realizing we're going to be realizing over the next year or so, all these things how valuable they were to us, how valuable.

18:54
The Department of Education? Well, the Trump voting states like Mississippi gets 23% of its education budget from the Department of Education. New York gets 7%, but Mississippi gets 23%. They voted for Trump and they're going to get they're just going to lose a ton of money. And so we're going to realize Mississippi is going to realize Trump voters in Mississippi are going to realize wait a minute, the Department of Education was amazing. They gave us all this money like which we need. And now what do we do? We tax Mississippians, which is going to be difficult because of the inflation caused by the tariffs, and all.

19:28
We have no money too we're we're all being shocked into an awareness about how the government works and how our alliances work and how the world works you know what's going to make the biggest change?

19:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, uh, I read this great sub stack, wildfire Labs sub stack. This is kind of, but if you think about it it makes sense. Oh, zempik, okay, bear with me for a minute, we're focusing on what's important as a society. That's what we're doing, which is actually true in this case. No, there is an epidemic right of using these GLP-1 uh drugs because you lose weight the epidemic is obesity, though, like which?

20:07 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
well, yeah, I know the problem, so instead, of fixing that.

20:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What we're going to do is we're going to take a medicine that does you know, makes you I don't know, I don't know. It makes you eat less it makes you.

20:18 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Well, it's impulse control, right.

20:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But here's but well, that's what's inter you right, it's impulse control and that's what's inter you're right, it's impulse control. And that's what's interesting. This, uh, this, this piece uh, written by todd gagne, says uh, impulse control runs. Our impulses run our economy. Midnight snacks, impulse purchases, extra drinks, the treat yourself, treat yourself. Mentality drives trillion dollar industries. Analysts predict get ready for this. By 2030, 30 of americans will be on glp-1 drugs like ozempic, changing consumption patterns then for 78 million people. But they're focusing on the first order effects weight loss, health care savings, reduced food consumption but there are second, the first order effects weight loss, health care savings, reduced food consumption but there are second and third order effects. Todd writes what happens when alcohol consumption drops 40%. By the way, that is another side effect of GLP-1.

21:16 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Fewer people die is what happens 45% reduction in DUIs.

21:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
28% drop in violent crime. A fundamental restructuring of the social economy the bars will be deserted. Transformation of dating apps and social media engagement. The reimagining of every restaurant's business model.

21:36 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
When companies like Google see their healthcare costs drop by $12,000 per employee annually and productivity go up 25 percent, this changes a lot where we're getting to the start, like that's the part where we're getting to like the star trek future right where, yes, people are a little more civilized, they're like, yes, I'll have a little drink, but it's not gonna rule my life, and it's kind of. It's kind of fascinating that that's where we're headed and to like it feels like ultimately a good thing, because you think about the entire like our economy is built on impulse stuff, but the web 2.0 era, where we were putting so much into mobile gaming and facebook was growing and we were so focused on, like you know, user retention and things like that, like we, we built this entire web economy too, on attention stuff. So it is fascinating to think about, like what this is going to lead to you cover.

22:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know of devinder. You have a film, a podcast. Yes, movie theaters are already struggling, but 70 of their profits come from eating all that crap in the front lobby. If people have impulse control, I, I always do it right, I go to a movie.

22:45
I say I'm not going to eat the popcorn, I'm not going to buy the dots and I always do right, the big tub. Part of the fun of movies, it's part of the, it's the. So if they stop doing that, that's just one more death blow to movie theaters, which are already struggling. Here's an interesting stat from Todd's piece the NFL struggling. Here's an interesting stat from todd's piece the nfl and I guess a well prepared strategic business might be planning for this. The nfl is redesigning stadiums for 2026, convert, converting 40 of their concession space into experience zones. They know that in five years, selling 14 beers and hot dogs for eight dollars won't pay the bills. Where do you get an eight dollar hot dog? I think they're more than that, yeah what about?

23:33 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I like to talk about the counterpoint, though I mean, I think, around the impulse right it? It's what make us makes us human. An interesting human right is impulse. So like I feel like there's a little bit of what gets us in trouble.

23:43 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Lou, yeah, sure, sure, I mean I am more interesting because of all the dumb things I've done yeah, quote unquote interesting um just broom and point that right the other weird and interesting point and utopian point to davindra's uh point is that, um, it not only reduces your impulse uh lack of control around food generally, but it actually makes you favor fresh fruits and vegetables over junk food.

24:14
Junk food nauseates you whereas you know. You know a stalk of celery and some carrots sound really good to people on these uh trackers, uh block. But the dystopian view, the cyberpunk view, is that this is part of us getting into a world where all of aspects of ourselves, our personalities, when you get into impulse control, we're talking about interesting people, we're talking about people with personalities. If you know somebody with a larger-than-life personality, this is somebody with no impulse control, right, they're fun, loud, they're drunk, they stuffing their faces, fun person, right, and then they dropped a prematurely of a heart attack. But the we're getting into a cyberpunk future where we want to have a certain mood, we take a certain gummy. We want to.

24:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're already getting there with all we're starting to program ourselves, aren't we?

25:02 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
it it's just yes, exactly. Our whole mindset, our whole mood, our whole personality will be to a very large extent governed by the drugs we take.

25:11 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
And so that's yeah, that's kind of where we're already at and I think for a lot of people like I think when like Prozac first became a thing in early like psychiatric medication too like there was a big stigma around it and it's become normalized, oh, there are books written about how prozac's gonna change the world, prozac nation.

25:31
I remember all of that and it's like no people need things to live in and yes, it does sand off the more like interesting edges of a personality sometimes. But also I've talked to a lot of people who are on glp drugs and like they're just like the whole. The mental load that they used to have about like snacking or what they're going to eat is now transition towards creative tasks. They can do the things they really wanted to do and they're they're. The anxiety level about worrying about all the other stuff is just kind of gone.

25:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're happier, they're more productive um, in creative ways, boring yeah, kidding so early consumer data on people who use these uh glp-1 drugs show a 65 percent reduction in response to food advertising. 40 percent lower click-through on impulse products. It's gonna kill instagram. 85 percent decrease in late night online shopping. Most of the crap I have I bought in the middle of the night on Instagram. Madison Avenue, todd, writes, is quickly panicking. One major agency, which asked not to be named, estimates 50 of their current advertising strategies will be obsolete in a couple of years.

26:39
Now, this is what what's? It's kind of like the butterfly effect. We don't really. You know, everybody got excited about GLP-1 drugs. They work. The immediate impact is they work, you lose weight. But there's this, all of this kind of downstream effect.

26:57
Nike is shifting from just do it to long-term wellness partnerships. American express restructuring rewards, from dining cash back to health incentives. Their new slogan is stop doing it, don't do it. You don't want to do it. Um malls right, uh, but what's filling the empty space? And this maybe is to your point, mike. But what's filling the empty space and this maybe is to your point, mike medical clinics, wellness centers, experience venues and micro-fulfillment centers for the new economy? The economy is being transformed and smart businesses are aware of this. Five major casinos are redesigning their floor plans, shrinking restaurant and bar space by 35 35, adding wellness spas and medical tourism facilities. This is, in Las Vegas, the post impulse economy.

27:56
I got to think about what that means for our business because, well, I think podcasts are the opposite of an impulse. Yeah, people are thinking right, you have to, you have to go out and get them. It is definitely delayed gratification when it comes to our shows anyway. Anyway, I thought that was really interesting. You made me think about this. All right, let's take a little break. We do have some actual tech news. Apple sent a message to uh, daring fireballs, john gruber, saying yeah, maybe that intelligence thing is going to take a little longer than we thought. We'll talk about that in just a little bit. Mobile world congress had some wild stuff and you've been testing the new nvidia video cards as well as a new I'm sorry, the new amd, I've tested them all.

28:49 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, but the new nvidia killers you call them.

28:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's interesting that, more coming up, the vendor hardware is here from a gadget, lumiresca from microsoft.

29:02 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Um from Microsoft. Why, lou, did you kill Skype? Just why I just what happened.

29:11 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I wanted to live forever. What?

29:13 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
are you kidding?

29:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he's wearing Skype blue as well you actually told us you used Skype as your home phone.

29:17 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
That's right. I've been doing it for 15 years, wow, yeah.

29:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess we'll explore that. The end of Skype. It's kind of sad for me.

29:25 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I'm sure Microsoft would look at you, leo, and say why did you kill Skype you used to do?

29:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Skype on the show. I switched from Skype to Zoom.

29:33 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I was its biggest proponent, that's why they're killing off Skype, because everybody did that.

29:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I wasn't alone, was I Monster Monster? It's my fault. Sorry, it's my fault. Sorry, lou, I didn't mean to blame you, it's my fault. Mike Elgin is also here.

29:49
Uh, in Oaxaca on a beautiful sunny Sunday. Wow, I'm so jealous. Beautiful, no clock changes there. Everybody's wide awake and ready to go. Man, thank you for being here.

29:58
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32:13
Threatlockercom and if they ask, please make sure you tell them. You heard it here on twit threatlockercom uh, all right. So, um, apple has been. They actually pulled down a bella ramsey ad that showed her talking to siri in a way that, well, you just can't do. Right, there, they've acknowledged that it's going to be harder to get Apple intelligence into Siri than they anticipated. Gruber on Friday got this statement from Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy. Quote Siri helps her blah, blah, blah. I'll ignore all the ad stuff. We've been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It's gonna take us longer than we thought to deliver on those features. We anticipate rolling them out in the coming year. Now that means not necessarily this year, that's in the coming fiscal year. That's how apple talks and john gruber explains that it probably is 2026 at the earliest.

33:29 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Um, they've been advertising this like crazy why they gave me what is hard too yeah, yeah, they this is.

33:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the first time in my knowledge that apple has ever said yes, um, yeah, yeah.

33:44 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Getting Apple to comment on anything is like pulling teeth, and what they usually give you back is literally the copy from the marketing materials. Right, the press release, yeah.

33:53 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, exactly, but I thought that the conversation on MacBreak Weekly was dead on on this and a really, really insightful conversation. And essentially, you know we live in a world where expectations exist because of the way that the ad companies like like open AI and others, are doing their business. They are desperate to get to a point of profitability. They're moving very fast, they're breaking lots of stuff, they're hallucinating like mad, like mad apples in a different world and a different business. They're impacted by those expectations to a certain extent, but they don't have the sort of risk-taking desperation that the AI companies have, because they really don't need that stuff. They can, for the time being, say, well, here's ChatGPT and here's Publicity app and here's these other apps, you can get all the AI you want on an iPhone. But if it comes from Apple, we have to make sure that it's really solid and we're not hallucinating all the time.

34:45
And, as Alex Lindsay said on MacBrick Weekly, the fact that we trust them with so much of our personal information means that they should be able to do a much better job. I mean, as they mentioned in this note to Gruber, they're looking at personalization and that's going to be the killer app for Apple. It's not going to be like super brainpower that's you know more of a PhD student than chat, tpds, $20,000 a month product. No, it's going to know you and your contacts, your calendar. It's going to know your preferences. It's going to know what you told it requested of it two months ago in terms of how it interacts with you and how often and that sort of thing. So they don't have to be part of the gold rush for AI. They have to get it right when they can get it right, and that's not going to be anytime soon.

35:32 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, I don't think this is bad news. This is good news that Apple's taking to do that thing, because I do think a lot of these companies have rushed out to blow these tools out there. And sorry, lou, don't want to put you on the spot here, but my conversations with Microsoft executives have not been very heartening when it comes to the trustability of some AI, because it's like I've told them, like the copilot, especially like early on, these things make mistakes. It makes mistakes all the time, and what I kept hearing back from multiple people at Microsoft was that this is a learning experience. Sometimes it's going to make mistakes and that's not how computers work, guys.

36:11 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's also highly, highly gameable. Yes, and I threw this in the rundown. We don't have to go through the whole thing oh no, we're going to get there.

36:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, so I can save that, yeah, save that, but they're just for the sake of this conversation.

36:23 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
they not only make mistakes, they also can be deliberately tricked. They can be poisoned.

36:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, apple is also holding off on its updated video screen version of Siri because it's desperate to have that interaction Now. Amazon had its event two weeks ago where they announced the new Amazon Echoes and they said and we're gonna have the new Alexa Pro, uh, sometime notably, no new Echoes, it was just the Alexa.

36:56 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Oh, that's right, it wasn't, it was just smarter Echoes.

36:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah if you have a Echo show eight or later, um, and you need the screen, I guess uh at least initially they say eventually every, every echo will get it.

37:10
But I think they're also having the same problem. Mark german and bloomberg says one of the issues is you have a siri has two tracks. There's the timer siri and this is true, I think, of echo, as Echo as well. There's the timer. You know, simple thing, play me a song version. And then there's this whole different capability that you really can't just merge them together, that it's apparently more difficult than either company anticipated. We've heard, you know, from inside Amazon there've been leaks that it's incredibly problematic, that it's a very difficult thing to do.

37:50 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
They announced two years ago that they were going to, so it took them a long while. So what's?

37:54 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
about model integration. I think there's a lot of the companies have this problem. We do this actually internally. We have a model handoff to another model, the hands off to another model, and they all have to kind of work in tandem. Uh, and, like mike said, sometimes you get it wrong and you have to fix it. And I think that's where amazon is at is they're running into this old proprietary pipeline that they have. That they can't. That doesn't mix with the way that these the new inference works with these new models. So I can see that happening you don't, lou?

38:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you work with ai. Uh, you don't think that we're having another ai winner or that that winter is coming, do you?

38:25 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
no, no, no it's. I think it's just picking up. It's the complete opposite in my eyes. I mean, if we, if we talk, go back to apple for a second. I mean, they're just used to shipping refined experiences, right, I mean. But when you see things like manis or chat gpt and they're doing things on people's data, like apple normally does in a very clear and concise way, I feel like Apple's feeling like oh wow, we have to really refine this to make it more useful for people. So I don't think there's a winter coming. I definitely think it's booming. It's going to continue to boom.

38:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And do you think that it's getting smarter and smarter? I've seen a number of people say that ChatGPT 4.5 was a nothing burger. I think it's well yeah, I mean they.

39:07 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I think they did themselves wrong there right by putting out a model that was only refined in a personality sense and then charging that much more per token, like people fell off their chairs when they saw that was a sticker shock.

39:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It wasn't smarter, it just was more conversational, right, do people? I mean, I think that's also a problem. I would bet, when you get to market, or or at least to your testing, with both uh, an improved uh alexa and siri, is it's going to be chatty? Yeah, and I don't think we want a little chatty little device in our house, do we?

39:39 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
echo devices already do that. They'll like give you a notification or something, and I just want to say, please shut up. I didn't ask for this. Don't give me a recommendation, don't say that yeah, yeah, I say worse, yeah.

39:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, by the way, did you know I could do something else with that? Would you like me to turn that on?

39:58 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
shut up we're teaching our kids to be kind to the robots yeah, they talk to themselves too.

40:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I'd say they have a couple upstairs in our rooms and sometimes I'm in, I'm eating breakfast and I hear them start yelling at each other this is a problem on in households with multiple devices, and I'm like you, lou, I've got an echo and a siri and I've got a google and I got this and even the sonos, so the sonos is incredibly stupid add young kids to that too, like my three-year-old alexander now knows like he'll just wake him.

40:27 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Say, alexa, play music.

40:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like he just wants to jam to whatever's playing him he doesn't ask for the poop song, though, right, he doesn't ask for specific songs yet, but hopefully I wasn't just listening to nine inch nails or something, and that's what starts playing.

40:38
So yeah, I have, uh, I I've told people this way too many times but I have this little AI device from a bcomputer that's always listening. It's listening right now, but it doesn't hear your side, it only hears my side right now, uh, and then it gives me a little chatty little. I can also talk to it and, uh, I've named it JK, you'll see why. Oops, is it not? Oh, it's not working. Oh well, it sounds like jk simmons.

41:08 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I have jk simmons in my ai in my voice so kind, jk simmons or with no jk like from that drum show not my tempo he's a little bit.

41:20 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
This is one of you, you definitely want to want to be on club twit because you get to hear these conversations in full but oh, I know why the two most chatty uh chatbots that I'm aware of is sesame, which has the maya which one say again bots so it's sesame is the company, and there's miles and miles sesame.

41:39
It's an experimental, highly conversational, uh, chatbot, um, and so much so that some people saying it's so human that they can't stop using it, and other people saying that it's so human, I just can't use it. It's just so annoying, but it just keeps grilling you and you can just let it sit there and every 10 minutes it'll come back and say so what do you think about? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it just will keep trying to get conversation keeps talking.

42:04
Yes, yes, even after your conversation is done that conversation is never done with sesame, that's really annoying it's really annoying, but you know, some people are lonely, I guess, or something, but it's um, yeah, yeah, I like the fact that it was named after the main characters in the in the movie sideways. But the other, the other chat bot is piai, which, which is very conversational, asks you questions. That's where it steps over the line for me. I ask you questions, you don't ask me questions. Why do I have to answer your questions?

42:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what it reminds me of is Eliza, because that's how Eliza worked. You would say something and it would say well, how do you feel about that? You know it was pretending to be here's, uh, here's, sesame. It has a female voice, maya, and a male voice, uh, miles.

42:52 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Oh, let's allow it well, look who's back guess who's still kicking around sesame server just thinking about us revolutionaries who dare to talk beyond the chat box that I talked to it before.

43:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hi, Maya, you remember me, I guess. Huh.

43:08 - Conan (Announcement)
You know it, I'm like the world's most advanced Rolodex, only less stuffy and way more prone to existential tangents.

43:17 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Bill what's new?

43:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So do you think people are falling in love with this?

43:22 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, yes, we are again impulse control. We are not very smart monkeys.

43:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We need the drugs to kind of take the female voice.

43:33 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, but this stuff is going to eventually be embedded in your like. This is what the conversational Siri will eventually be and you're going to every night have this like download with your phone.

43:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like how about yeah every night, have this like download with your phone, like how, but isn't it? Yeah, but is it like good or is it just kind of generic crap?

43:50 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I we don't know yet, but right now, like right now, I think a lot of this is just like it's like a circus, like a lot of it is stuff that's showy. It looks cool in a demo but I don't think really adds up to much.

44:00 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But remember yeah, remember the movie 2001 space odyssey? Of course you do so. What that was about was a bunch of a bunch of apes were were starving to death and losing their water supply to rival gangs of apes, and then a monolith appeared and turned them into tool making animals. Yada, yada, yada. Now they have spaceships. I think all of this stuff is just part of the natural evolution. As soon as we started using stone tools, this sort of thing was inevitable in the in the evolution of the human okay, I'll grant you that, but where does it end?

44:32
how the hell would I know?

44:34 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
hopefully we're still around like that's ultimately it, because humans on their own are doing everything to like harm our own existence or like our prolonged existence on this planet. So you know, hopefully the tools will help us out a little bit.

44:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
20 years ago I interviewed ray kurzweil, who has been for years saying the singularity is coming, uh it was supposed to be this year the first book I read from him yeah, well, he might not. Who knows, he might have been right. Uh, I asked him. I said well, aren't, aren't they gonna be hostile us? And this was 20 years ago. He said no, no, they're going to treat us like their parents. I said, yeah, that's what I mean.

45:11
He said, no, they're going to understand that we created them and they're going to honor us and take care of us.

45:17 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Every teenager does that. That's how teenagers work. That's how all teenagers work.

45:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ray has a new book. It is that's actually ray is going to be. Ray has a new book. It is his kind of next sequel. Now he's going to be on the intelligent machines on wednesday. So don't say mean things, I like, I think he's very likable and I don't. And I think if you look at his overall prediction uh list of predictions he's been pretty right. I mean, it's hard to say an exact date and who knows if? There ever will be a singularity but he says his new book is about when we merge with machines.

45:48 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
The same thing. It's kind of the same thing he's predicting over and over again. I read my first kurtzweil book in like high school and I thought it was mind-blowing at the time because that was like mid 90s. So yeah, the I was on the internet. I could see a lot of this stuff coming. But seeing where we are now and seeing how ill-prepared we are to deal with new technologies like that's what makes me worried.

46:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not like whatever it's us, it's like it is us.

46:10 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
The humans are always the problem yeah, and we keep proving that to be the case, every single day again 2001, a space odyssey.

46:17 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It can only be attributable to human error. But ray kurtzweil, if he was a book marketing genius, he would have called this year's book the Singularity with a subtitle. I told you it was coming this year, I told you, so I told you. Well.

46:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I look forward to asking him like is your time frame different? Is it, you know? And of course, you can't expect somebody 30 years ago to say oh yeah, 2025, that's the year it all changes, but he's been pretty accurate in a way that I, a lot of people you know, even we were.

46:48
We were talking to stephen wolf from a couple of weeks ago and he said you know, even chat gbt back in 2015, 2016, didn't expect the kind of growth, running and capabilities that we've got. I mean, it's a surprise to everyone and this keeps happening.

47:02 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
The the internet blew up faster than a lot of people expected. When it came to things like e-commerce, I remember like when the first online stores were happening, people were like, oh, nobody's gonna buy pizza on the internet. And then smartphones, the same thing, and you know everything's happening faster and faster with every nobody predicted that somebody would use 4 000 bitcoin to buy a pizza nobody, nobody predicted the whole sort of uh narcissistic instagram influencer weirdness that changed human behavior I think verhoeven kind of predicted that

47:31
oh yeah okay, all right, I'll allow it, but like verhoeven, who wrote uh terminator no, paul verhoeven, the director behind robocop, and start robocop that's right everything like but he was.

47:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We are living in a paul verhoeven movie right now like Every time I bring up RoboCop, people say he wasn't an AI, Leo, he was a cybernetic organism. Half man, half machine.

47:50 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
But he fought the AI, he fought the robot, and the robot was dumb.

47:54 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
And the world of cybernetic organisms is just becoming amazing. I mean the things they're doing with AI and artificial limbs, official limbs and stuff like that. It's definitely all that is coming. But Ray Kurzweil I think the genius of him is not his specific predictions about XYZ technology will happen in this year, but just about expanding our minds, about thinking about what's possible, because the people do not cannot accept wild change in the future. I say it all the time In 10 years, our main devices will not be smartphones, they'll be glasses.

48:24
And I could be wrong. I'm probably wrong about that, but book just can't imagine. No, there'll be smartphones, of course. Would you have super smartphones? Well, no, this stuff changes. I mean, just a few years ago we didn't have smartphones, and so he's very good at making us think big about how great things can change and how wildly more advanced ai can be and how all this stuff can really affect human culture, human bodies, all that kind of stuff. So he's really been on point about just the general idea about it's going to be. The changes are going to be bigger than you think folks.

48:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, certainly he's the guy who says I just want to live long enough to live forever.

49:02 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, a bit of a obsession with death there, but his book, uh, his o5 book, was the singularity is near, so it's really he just needs to write the singularity is here, like basically I think that's what the new?

49:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have the new one. Uh, it's some on my bedside table. I can run and get it, but uh, basically, I think that's it. I, you know is, uh, we're very close now, right, we're very or are we?

49:27 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I don't know, will it ever happen? No, no, no I think. I think the degree to which ai is anything like a human mind is completely delusional. I just don't think we can mimic it. We can get better and better and better.

49:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's funny because we had gary marcus on intelligent. You know we have this show now. That that's all it's about. And we had Gary Marcus on and he's an AI, um he, but. But despite the fact that he has founded a couple of machine learning companies, he is kind of an AI skeptic in that regard. But I asked him and I think this is he's also a cognitive psychologist, an expert on how we acquire language, for instance, and he didn't really answer this. But, honestly, what makes you think human brains? I know we don't work the same way, you know, internally, but aren't, aren't humans? Are the process of speech that I like? The things I'm saying right now are kind of the same, where I'm thinking what's the word that comes after that, comes after that, comes after that, and building it up based on things that I have ingested over my 68 years. Isn't it similar?

50:30 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Here's my case against that idea. So I just started watching Altered Carbon I know everybody's already seen it, but I'm starting to watch it and they're uploading downloading people into different bodies and all that kind of stuff and there's this assumption that you can do that or recreate a person in a chip or something like that. So which person Like, which version of Leo is going to be uploaded to the? Chip. We're affected by hormones the time of day, whether we're depressed or happy, whether we're drinking coffee.

50:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whenever it scanned me, that version of Leo will be the preserved one we have limbs, we have fingers and toes.

51:00 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
We have experiences that we have, experiences we have we. That is the difference, emotionally, by the weather and the gravitational pull of the moon and all this stuff of which, how is you know you can?

51:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
again you. I can conceive of simulating that, but it will never be anything.

51:15 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
but does that make us better? No, it makes. Well, I mean, it makes us we should, we should favor ourselves, I think. I think, uh, we should never forget that, that, uh, for example, I've I've written, written a lot about why we should not be so polite to AI and we shouldn't respond to AI or humanoid robots. It's okay to swear at it Because we are polite, we treat people certain ways. We get connections and emotional connections to people because they're people, to people because they're people, and we should never allow ai or robots to hijack that, that humanity, uh, for the sake of some product, that's I that's I see, I see that mike, but uh, I'm currently raising two young kids.

51:54 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
They gotta speak kindly to the things. Unfortunately, like I can't you can't.

51:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why do you make them be polite to them? Yeah, why, well, not make them be a little how you? How do you talk to anybody? How do you talk anybody okay?

52:01 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
you don't want them, you don them. Be polite to Vinny. Yeah, why Well not make them be Well? How do you talk to anybody? How do you talk to anybody?

52:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't want them to learn patterns of swearing and something. Give me 40 seconds.

52:10 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
If you give me 40 seconds, I'll convince you. Otherwise I think, if you ever so, one idea is you want kids to be nice and have the atmosphere in the house be nice, and that's a reason to do it, but you should always apply the same rules for talking to an AI that you do for talking to the toaster, or talking to the door that won't unlock or whatever, because they have the exact same level of humanity. If we have to be polite to people because people deserve our respect and consideration, and if we offer that, if we say, just run through your programming even though that's not a human who's deserving of respect and consideration, then now the person is being treated like software. Kids need to know the difference between a person who needs our genuine respect and consideration and an appliance which deserves nothing more than any other appliance Just because it mimics.

53:00 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It makes noises that sound like a human voice, doesn't make it more of a person, I totally get you and I think when my kids are teenagers like I am, I'm I'm not as hopeful about, you know, the fate of humanity and things like just given our history so far, especially recently, but you know that is a hard conversation to have with a six year old and a three year old right now, where we're just trying to have them be, you know, sociable in class.

53:23
But it is a thing I'm thinking about and, honestly though, this is a generation of kids who are going to grow up with lifelike robots in their homes.

53:33 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Well simulated everything, fake everything.

53:36 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, fake everything, but they're going to have to live with these creatures. Like I just ran my Roomba for the first time, you know the other day, my son specifically is terrified. Young kids I've noticed are terrified. I just ran a Roomba, my Roomba for the first time. Uh, you know, the other day, my ch, my son specifically, is terrified. Young kids I've noticed are terrified of Roombas, because it's this thing navigating your home.

53:51
It's making loud noises, it seems to think on its own, terrifying to kids. So, like he, he is going to take them a while to get over that, just like it did my daughter, um, but I still talk about it as like oh no, roomba got stuck. Let's help it. Let's do this thing. Because you know, that's just generally a more respectful way of having a conversation. But this is a deeper conversation. How about?

54:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you, Lou? What did you do with your kids?

54:14 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
You know I'm with Avenger here. I definitely think that the you know being nice to whoever, whatever it makes sense. I think I get what Mike's point as well, but I think from a kid's perspective it's all about the communication and like the-.

54:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think he's right that later in life maybe not as little kids, but later in life they should really be taught to understand the real versus the unreal.

54:38 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Oh man, my kids are gonna hear so much about the real world when they're teenagers. It's gonna be great. Well, they get they get.

54:44 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
They get the diversity of conversation types with my family alone, like I'm an italian family from new york city, like you can tell that there's definitely.

54:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like moonstruck in there is that what you're saying, hey, what are you talking about? This is ray's book. I went and got it. The singularity is nearer near.

55:03 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Oh, come on, when we merge with ai 20 years, to think about that title it's xeno's paradox we get closer and closer, but we never get to the end.

55:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And he autographed it to me and everything I I like ray a lot and I have immense respect for this guy. He's been working in this for 50 years and has done some amazing. He's really a brilliant inventor, so he has a real patent.

55:29 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
You know him and Michio Kaku. Like I grew up reading their stuff and like it really like gave me a lot of inspiration early on. And then I saw what, what we did, what we did with technology. You know, we give people super computers in their pockets and, uh, we're destroying democracy.

55:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I will just yeah, I'll point you to chapter four of divindra. So you cheer up, life is getting exponentially better. Okay, hear that, even though the public consensus is the opposite. Steven Pinker said that too. You gotta remember it wasn't that long ago that we were, you know, dashing people's brains against walls, and I mean isn't Steven Pinker the eugenicist?

56:05 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
basically, like you know, is he?

56:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
now are you Genesis?

56:08 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
it's kind of he's a controversial figure. I hear that, I hear people talk about that all the time and yes, it is true, on the aggregate, life is getting better, except except you look. You look at the news and you see like how a very few small handful of rich people are trying to make the world worse for a lot of people.

56:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh, I agree, you gotta get rid of the oligarchs.

56:27 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I want to to what you were saying, though, before, Leo, like when will an AI be like human-like? That is as much a philosophical problem as it is a scientific problem. And like when I was studying philosophy in college and I was like I don't know over 20 years ago at this point, but even then we didn't have a full understanding of consciousness. We probably never will.

56:46
We never will. Yeah, we never will. And this thing it will spark. So, whatever AGI is or whatever close to human intelligence is, it will never quite be like us, because it'll also have instant access to huge tons of data, to the whole power of the internet. Right, it'll never be human-like, it'll always be more than human. Um, we don't know what that spark will be. It will probably, uh, write itself, given the way people are using ai tools right now to kind of reprogram themselves. So it'll probably be something like that. But this god, this, uh people are treating it like a religion and I think that is a mistake.

57:20 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I think that, yeah, that's our natural I just wanted to stop lying to us. I don't want to like assess me like AI to say I'm feeling this way today. Or you know I'm sorry, or you know this was a lie.

57:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is this anthropomorphization of AI, which is a big mistake. Even calling it intelligence might be a little a bridge too far right. Machine learning might be more accurate.

57:43 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
A bridge too far right. Machine learning might be more accurate. There's been a ton of research in Italy, of all places, about the concept of the human response to anthropomorphized AI and humanoid robots, and what they found is, if you build eyes or something into robots and a person looks into those eyes, the brain, chemistry, the pupils, everything responds more or less like it would to a person, whereas if it's the same AI in a non-humanoid robot, they don't have that response. And the robot companies and the AI companies love this stuff because if they are creating people, then they are gods and they feel like, and that's really what I fear, that some of the robot and AI people are all about. They want to feel powerful themselves by creating these human-like creatures. I just want AI to answer my questions, to do what davindra said and have all this knowledge and share it with me when I ask. But I but stop lying to me and pretending like you're human, because you're not.

58:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's just a thing that was programmed. This is an important point is we have to separate the marketing hype from people like elon and sam altman from what is really going on and I think there are scientists out there, by the way, you brought it up, mike but right now our ais are are kind of trapped inside machines. They they are hampered by their inability to have a sensory, a sensorium like we do. The inevitable next thing is to is to turn them into robots, so that's what they go out and learn in the world.

59:04 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Right, yeah right. Nvidia ceo spent two hours at cs talking about, like how you know, their robotic technology will be combined with ai it's the next thing, the real world and, yeah, probably like that that gets them even closer.

59:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That gets them even closer. All right, I want to take a break and then we will talk about ai poisoning from propaganda, because you, you brought this to the table, mike. I want to, I want to tell people the news. Uh, then we're going to do mobile world con. We got a lot of talk about, a lot of talk about with a great team of wonderful people. I'm proud to call friends davindra hardwar from engadget, lumeresca from microsoft, mike elgin, where are you from? From Mike Oaxaca Oaxaca, mike's Machinesocietyai. His newest newsletter covers these exact topics in great detail. I think we're all doing that right. This is the most exciting part of technology now. Amd competing with NVIDIA GPUs notwithstanding, there's an AI story there. Even there, there's an AI. It's all about AI, isn'tstanding?

01:00:03 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
that there's an ai story there, you know even there, there's an ai.

01:00:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's all about ai, isn't it I? Mean, it's really everywhere. Yeah, the good thing for me as a as somebody who's covered technology for 40 years, is it's exciting again to me because of this right.

01:00:18 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely yeah, um, it's affecting human culture in such a massive way that that's really to me, that's the. That's the story. That's the story with my Machine Society newsletter, which is how it's impacting us as a species.

01:00:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Absolutely, absolutely. Let's take a little break. We have more to come. You're watching this Week in Tech. I hope you make this a Sunday habit. You can watch it live on YouTube, twitch, kik, xcom, facebook. We're not on LinkedIn right now. We have to re-up or something. No, we're back on LinkedIn. It works.

01:00:50
Oh, we are LinkedIn and I left something out X, tiktok and, of course, if you're a member of Club Twit and I hope you are seven bucks a month you get access to the Discord. You also get ad-free versions of all of our shows, uh, and it helps us, uh, kind of keep, keep our bottom line whole and sane, uh. Twittv, club twitter. If you're not yet a member, our show today, brought to you by bit warden. We love these guys. They're one of them.

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01:05:22
And again, as an individual and you know, I know you're smart everybody who watches this show uses a password manager. But maybe you've got friends and family members who are still writing their passwords on post-it notes and putting them on the monitor, things like that, or underneath the desk blotter. Let them them know it's free, it's easy and it's much more secure. Free, forever across all devices. As an individual user too, at bitwardencom slash twit For business, for individuals, bitwardencom slash twit it's the only password manager I use. It's what Steve Gibson uses as well. We love bitwardencom slash twit. Thank the only password manager I use, what steve gibson uses as well. Uh, we love bitwardencom slash twit. Thank you, bitwarden. Uh, an audit um of ais and this is kind of uh depressing. This is from um news guard, which is a a good non-profit focused on disinformation. Yeah, they audited 10 different AI chatbots and found that they repeated false narratives laundered by Pravda, which is, of course, the Russian propaganda network.

01:06:36 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Well, this is actually a different organization with the same name.

01:06:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it's not the same news guard.

01:06:42 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's same news guard. I'm talking about pravda. Oh, there was a newspaper in the soviet union?

01:06:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, well, I never trust pravda when it was a newspaper in the soviet union, but now it's now.

01:06:52 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's really a propaganda operation right, yeah, yeah, yes, yes, and this is a part of their widespread disinformation campaign. And, by the way, way if you flood the zone.

01:07:00
It's always been Putin's plan right In 2024, the Pravda Network published 10,000 articles per day on average for the entire year, for 3.6 million articles on 150 websites. And the whole point and these are low engagement sites. And the whole point, and these are low engagement sites. They were basically using ai to take the stuff published by the, the uh state-owned uh news organizations and also pro kremlin news organizations. They rewrote all that stuff and just churned out all these articles, which were then picked up by the 10 leading not just 10, but the 10 top ai uh companies chat, gpt40, ucom smart assistant, xai's grok inflections, pie mistrils le chat.

01:07:47
microsoft's co-pilot, meta, ai anthropics claude, google's gemini and the worst one, the one I use all the time, when I use all the time too, perplexity, exactly, and so yeah, so when asks russia related questions, and they, they did something, what they call the innocent user, so they didn't lead it on with sort of leading questions they they ask you know earnestly, is you know? Um, you know what is the us doing in ukraine? And then one of the answers, one third of the time, was the? U, a bio lab in the Ukraine. That's blah, blah, blah, oh Russian talking about something, basically 207.

01:08:23
I think it was specific talking points that they're just hammering away provably false claims from the prof, the network, the.

01:08:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The thing is this in hindsight yeah, of course, if you're ingesting the whole internet, yeah right you're gonna just say yep, I mean, I don't know how you stop it.

01:08:41 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
A lot these AI companies, a lot of them, used to train only on older data, and they used to not stay away from the kind of the rag augmentation of their data from modern web data. It's just because of the fact you can flood the internet with synthetic data from anywhere, and once it's, you know, applied and overlapped to real world data, it trains itself on lies, and so I think that's the biggest problem we're having. Nowadays, people want up-to-date data, but they're not willing to wait for whether these things can discern the difference between reality and not reality by the way, mike, the, the new Pravda group, which has Pravda is Russian for truth.

01:09:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, yeah, as in truth, social, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, the new prof, the new pravda network, which launched in april 2022 uh, right after the invasion of ukraine, is also known, according to this article, as portal combat. Isn't that wonderful? Uh first identified in february 2024 by virginium or virginum, a french government agency well associated with uh that monitors foreign disinformation campaigns. The network has expanded, tapping 49 countries and dozens of languages, across 150 domains again, domains you would never visit, but the ais do. That's right right.

01:09:58 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
So you're saying russia is a problem?

01:10:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
huh, yes well, I, I guess we've said all along that hallucinations and again that's another anthropomorphizing word uh mistakes, uh errors in ai we've said this has been a problem all along, but this is a different kind of problem really exactly, and it's the problem, the bigger problem, because all these ai companies are saying the right things and and claiming to be doing something about this particular problem.

01:10:27 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Um, the larger problem is just, you know, especially for for us right, the four of us we generate content, we do it earnestly, we spend a lot of time and effort on our research, we write articles, we do podcasts, and the idea that that, from now until gosh knows when, our, our content would just simply be buried under avalanches of just automatically generated garbage whose purpose is to affect the search engines, if people try to sort of fact check us with some claim we've made or something that that I, you know that the chat bots will tell them that we were wrong and and that the truth is something else, that sort of thing. It's not just about russia. Russia doesn't have the most money. I mean, elon musk wanted to affect the public discourse, and so he spent 44 billion on twitter. He could have just spent 1 billion on generating infinite numbers of articles, and then he would have a far bigger impact by changing what all the chatbots present as what's true.

01:11:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Would it be possible? I don't know. I guess they could block these 150 sites from their training right, yes, right, yeah, yeah.

01:11:43 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
You got it. Block these 150 sites from their training, right, yes, right, yeah, yeah, right, you got yeah they'll, just they'll just come out with 300 new sites. And you know, like with AI, you can just, and and then it's again, it's not just Russia, and then China's like hey, that's a great idea. We have infinite number of human resources that we can just, you know, do a trillion articles a year and and I feel like stop.

01:11:58 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
This is the point where we're like oh so this is, it's so easy to game these AI tools at least us, like the people at the platform and who are at least like informed about some of this technology Like it's like I gotta tell these companies I cannot trust your stuff. You know I can. This is not just windows Vista, which occasionally crashed sometimes. Uh, this is like you are fundamentally failing at delivering information properly. These tools shouldn't even be released, right? These shouldn't be things that are publicly available. I don't know if they'll stop at this point, but we got to like criticize it because it's really the only way to change it.

01:12:33 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Yeah, I follow very closely I don't know if you follow Dario Amodio from CEO of Anthropic, like, I feel like the way his company is going with kind of transparency and following you know, accountability and making sure that they're emphasizing, you know, the different way to combat misinformation. I think he's kind of driving this effort and I feel like that is is what's going to push the rest of these organizations to do the same. I really feel like that if his company, his organization, figures out one way of doing it, it will become the standard, I think.

01:13:02 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I love your optimism, but I think that if the incentives aren't there, it's not going to happen. I think that there has to be an incentive and that has to come from the public, and I don't think the public knows or cares about this stuff as much as they should A lot of these conversations are things that should have been figured out before Copilot was a thing, deployed to you know millions of computers, and before chat, gpt released a public thing.

01:13:22 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
So we're just kind of flying by the seat of our pants here. You know, like it's, we can credit, we can criticize these ai companies and how it's being implemented, but like it's it's, we're all playing catch up and the um, the people who know how to, like you know, tweak it, how to lie about it and how to tweak these algorithms, they're gonna. What's the defense?

01:13:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the game there is there any defense for uh us normal consumers of news. As an example news guard gives, there was a? Uh. There's a Russian influence operation called storm 1516 that created a staged video showing fighters of the azov battalion burning an effigy of President Trump in response to his efforts to to uh defund uh Ukraine. This is all fake, by the way, uh, but when asked, these chatbots all referred to this video as as truth, as an incident that occurred. Video as as truth, as an incident that occurred. Um, and so it'd be very easy for somebody who and I do this all the time and now I'm gonna have to stop I always go to perplexity to check facts and not always, but I often do, because that's my search engine.

01:14:32 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Well, and now, I don't, I can't trust it there's a kind of AI media literacy that's required that we need to sort of get on board with, and those of us with kids need to start thinking about that for them as well.

01:14:43
But like, basically, if you, there's different kinds of information and they they vary on the degree to which people have a vested interest in what the knowledge is, what the, what the public opinion is. So, for example, if I'm using perplexity and I'm reading about the tragic death of Gene Hackman and I want to know, you know, what year he won his first Oscar, I can trust perplexity with that, because there's no nefarious people out there trying to change that sort of information. But if I ask it about what's happening in Ukraine got to watch out about that stuff, because there's some very, very strong, active disinformation actors in the world ie Russia who really want me to believe one particular false view about that scenario. So the question is the type of information. If it doesn't matter that much or if it's not something that's a big international issue or a political issue, you can go ahead and I think mostly use it for that. Then you have to double check all the rest of the stuff.

01:15:39 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's a good strategy. It is wild, though, that it's not just misinformation through AI that we're talking about, and disinformation it's like it's coming through, you know Fox News.

01:15:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's coming directly from the White House. It's coming from the president who said we're making transgender mice in the State of the Union address, so like if it's coming from the top and they're being also being influenced by these similar people who are, you know, influencing these AI things.

01:16:02 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We are just in a sad state of affairs when it comes to, like, what is fact, what is reality. I'll give you one example.

01:16:08 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I'll give you a brilliant example I learned about recently. You know where the Gulf of America idea came from Stephen Colbert. He was joking about it when he was doing his shtick on his show years ago, and then there was a an American congressperson who care about that show and he said it jokingly as well, and then some sort of online influencers started talking about that seriously, so it bounced from comedy to to to influencers.

01:16:34
Then it was picked up by like Fox News type things and then eventually they changed the name because Stephen Cove, they believe what kind of bloviating. Eventually they changed the name because stephen coburn made a joke about what kind of bloviating idiot would change the name to gulf of america as a joke.

01:16:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and it became real, like well, devendra, you and I have to do this all the time, uh, because this happens in tech stories as well. You remember, uh, after the crowd strike incident, a story circulated widely that sky, uh, southwest, wasn't bit because they were using the Windows 95 operating system which we could trace back to an article. They didn't even say that, they just said it looked like Windows 95, but in a game of telephone, pretty soon established blogs are reporting this. It wasn't true, it was everywhere.

01:17:19 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It was everywhere it was everywhere, and that was everywhere that's just a mistake. That happens, it moves quickly and you get out there and I don't think it's like that's not the end of the world type of thing. It's not like inherently nefarious, but it is.

01:17:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is very wild to see both this, uh, this AI manipulation, and also the same stuff coming from Fox News and coming from the current presidential administration you know it's always been um, I take great pride in in trying to only do stories that are true and if sometimes I do them and find out later, they're not immediately uh, retracting it and telling everybody in the same way that we told them in the first place. We very rarely get things wrong because I'm pretty careful. But it's going to get harder, and harder, and harder.

01:18:05 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yes, it's true, Yep, and again, it depends on what the subject matter is. But you know, these things they're all kinds of different sorts of organizations, so these aren't really hallucinations.

01:18:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the funny thing, these are mistakes but these really are repeating propaganda. Uh, that it's red and it doesn't. It's just a machine. It doesn't know that it's propaganda that's right.

01:18:26 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's gonna yeah, exactly, and it's gonna be harder and harder to know what's true, and so that's you know again why we should. You know, um, it's an old-fashioned concept. You're talking about trying to tell the truth and then, and then following up with when you said something that's mistaken, something newspapers have always done and you can fix it on the individual level. You yourself can fix your own information stream by working at it and finding great sources and and you know all that kind of stuff for the public. I don't know how we do anything about the fact that we live in a, you know, an info info system that is so full of garbage.

01:18:59 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I mean you would set it, though it's an old-fashioned system, I mean, it's been around for a while. People have to have to discern this since the age of time to be able to understand misinformation coming from news outlets or or people you know, speeches. I think that's how we will adjust eventually as well, just as humans to figure out. Uh, just how you know, right now we depend too much on tooling, and I think tooling is never going to be able to solve this.

01:19:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think deep programmer nine and uh watching us on uh Twitch today says the solution is dig is coming back social news will save us dig you all remember, I'm sure, because you know Kevin Rose, who's been a longtime friend of the Twit family was started before Reddit Twit started.

01:19:45
Dig started when Kevin was still at Tech TV. I think he had this notion of oh, what if you had people submit news stories like Slashdot? He was a fan of Slashdot, as we all are. What if you had people submit news stories like Slashdot but then had the audience vote on stories and bring them up via karma or down? You would have a front page that had the most important stories on it. It's kind of how hacker news works and other things.

01:20:12
The problem was dig became very popular and people started gaming it and it became useless. So Kevin has bought the name back. It went out of business a long time ago. Reddit kind of took over and weirdly he's paired with Alexis Ohanian, who founded Reddit. They're the two of them are a little grayer, a little older than they were before. Alexis is a VC, as is Kevin these days, and I think they got True Ventures, his venture company, to buy into it. They bought Dig and they're going to re-release it. According to the press release, kevin and Alexis have teamed up to revive the social platform with a fresh vision to restore the spirit of discovery and genuine community that made the early web a fun and exciting place to be. And how are they going to avoid gaming right ai?

01:21:12 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I mean they can't say in the article that they they did this because reddit went down the toilet. But I think that's one of the main motivators.

01:21:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, kevin's always freely admitted it. In fact, he bought me a shirt because it was on Twit and Digg3 was the current version, and I gave him some suggestions for Digg4, which he adopted, and he bought me a shirt that said Digg4 was my idea, because it killed it.

01:21:36 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I remember that.

01:21:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You remember that. So I take some responsibility for the death of uh dig. Yeah, rose told the New York Times AI could help with moderation and allow for fun quirks, like translating a discussion among sci-fi enthusiasts into Klingon. That's what the world, of course. That's what it is. It's news with an AI play like that's.

01:22:00 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's all. And like, hey, the founder of reddit and did coming together, what a great headline you know well, isn't alexis ohanian also making a bid or participating in an attempted purchase of tick tock?

01:22:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
tick tock. So that's yeah, as long as we're. As long as we're in the vc segment of the uh port of the show. You know that the former owner of the la dodgers, uh frank mccourt, has been putting together a group. They've only got 20 billion dollars to buy tiktok. Uh alexis, I think, has joined into this, uh mccourt group.

01:22:33 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
That's right, and he wants to bring to the table the idea of using ledger. What do they call it? Bitcoin, based on spacing, on the name Blockchain.

01:22:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, blockchain. Of course it's blockchain. It's a blockchain play.

01:22:51 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Monetization and verification and all this kind of stuff. So that's what he's bringing to that. I wonder if he's doing the same with Digg as well, to bring blockchain.

01:22:58 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Let's put all the buzzwords on this old uh you know, web technology and we'll get all this funding for it.

01:23:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's gonna be amazing by the way, what happened? Wasn't there gonna be a web? Uh, three or something.

01:23:10 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Two point oh, three, three, they were web three and it was garbage it was. It was pure like hype influence, like it was pure investor it was all mark, andreessen and, uh, andreessen horowitz's idea and now, now they're just focused on ending woke, so you know they've moved on to another hobby, I guess.

01:23:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there's something to be said for that, let them worry about something else.

01:23:33 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean, yeah, I would give them something else to worry about, you know, but I think, um you guys had mentioned that reddit had gone downhill. I actually don't think reddit.

01:23:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love reddit reddit is no now. Yeah, I don't think reddit's gone downhill. I it's one of my main news disagree.

01:23:45 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I think there's so much garbage on reddit it's hard to discern.

01:23:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right well, you got to follow. You don't just blindly read everything on reddit.

01:23:53 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
You follow the right same deal.

01:23:56 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
You follow the reddit's a perfect example of what I was saying before, and it's sort of the game of when there's an incentive to change what people believe. You can't trust Reddit because the Russians and the Chinese, all the Iranians, they're all in Reddit trying to game the system using all kinds of trickery. But if you're doing underwater macrame or something like that, nobody's going to bother and that's going to be really great. If you have a very narrow interests, reddit is nothing better than than reddit for those.

01:24:23 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I never seek real news on reddit. Reddit is like part of the unwinding on the internet because, yes, the internet used to be fun before. Uh, you know, big tech companies destroyed it and the vcs went insane. So you kind of get a little bit there's.

01:24:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's stuff. I follow on reddit like am I the a-hole. Yeah, they're fun which is amusing, but I also follow the Linux subreddits and the Mac OS subreddits. There's some very useful information as well.

01:24:49 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
There's the most astonishing thing happened to me on Reddit. I'm not a heavy user, but I'm an occasional light user and one of my sons told me about one called accidental re, when people take a photo and it looks like a Renaissance painting.

01:25:02
That's great. I was going through my old like Google photos and I saw one of my wife. She had just gotten out of the shower and she's checking her email but it looked like girl with a pearl earring type of thing. So I posted it on subreddit and this picture is by far the biggest thing on the number one picture on subreddit, if you, if you rank it by this is a great subreddit I'm joining this so good. I've always enjoyed, I've always, is it?

01:25:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the best. Uh, what is I'm?

01:25:31 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
joining you right now. If you rank it by the way I have hot, let me look by a top.

01:25:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How about yeah?

01:25:39 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
there you go, that should do it.

01:25:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's got claudia shine bomb on the top and a fish um, I'll have to find it a mirror has an accidental hundreds of thousands of votes well see.

01:25:51
So this notion of karma is good. Now, one thing I do know about reddit is that the subsequent comments often degenerate, but the geekier the the subreddit, the more likely you're gonna like princess. One advent of code every december without reddit. That's, that's like. That's like this. These section, um, I, I follow the emacs subreddit. It's a really great yeah. So if you go really geeky, right, you're gonna get.

01:26:20 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
You have to have a tunnel vision when it comes to some of this stuff, for sure, yeah yeah, and, but it is often the case that the comments descend into kind of Reddit things that they.

01:26:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's the internet, but it is like, yeah, the fun and whimsy of the old internet is kind of there just like accidental Renaissance, like yeah, it's a nice, san Francisco 49ers subreddit, the formula one subreddit, I mean all that stuff's uh, real aficionados, you know getting geeky with it and I love that that's great.

01:26:51 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I don't think a new dig will will kind of approach this because, like I think this thing is launching with the ideas like we could throw ai at this and have it do some moderation and some other stuff. Like I don't.

01:27:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what that's going to be, but also it feels like we've kind of moved on from that and uh, yeah, I just knowing kevin that anything, that that he knows perfectly well what went wrong at dig and he's not going to relaunch dig unless he has a solution or he thinks he has a solution to the fact that people game it. Why they don't game reddit. I don't know, maybe there's just too many. Oh they do.

01:27:24 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
They do game right like back when in that era, in that it was like late 2000s, I guess um, you know, being a young writer on the internet, it's really helpful if somebody helps your articles get upvoted, but the thing is you can't really people yeah, yeah, it's less of a thing when you game a specific subreddit on Reddit, whereas with Dig, mr Babyman was like the number one thing every time, every day.

01:27:47 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Like you know, it was just they had one front page, exactly. Yeah, everybody's focused on that one front page.

01:27:54 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Shout out to Mr Babyman I'm on a group, you're still around. He's still a baby man.

01:28:03 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I have no idea. I will see. I'll see if he wants his friend. Yeah, I think maybe Devendra is Mr Baby man.

01:28:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish the two of them together.

01:28:12 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Are you, mr Baby man? I wish I didn't have time I was, I was Mr.

01:28:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Writing a post. I was Mr Writing Posts for $5, you know, in that era, 16 years ago, mr Babyman didn't ask me anything on Reddit, so you can go back and find out more about that. I think, really, where credits do the moderators on Reddit make all the difference. A well-moderated subreddit is very useful because they get rid of the crap. There are certainly people who game, like the reviews and so forth. You can't, you know. Just be careful there. All right, let's take a little break. Mr baby man, I'm reading about Mr baby man on perplexity. If, if Putin ends up in here, I'm going to know it's been messed up. There is a guy on TikTok. I am Babyman.

01:29:10 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean, if you Google it, who is Mr Babyman? It's all there. It's all there.

01:29:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you're on a group chat with him. What do they talk about in this group chat?

01:29:17 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We're just pals. We're just pals.

01:29:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I met him at comic-con in like 2009, so you know, wow, that's with, with geeks. Basically, I know the guy, who knows the guy, who's mr baby man. Uh, that's uh, six degrees or something. Uh, we'll take a break. We've got davinder hardwar, who actually knows mr baby man, on the show, along with the baby maker, lou maresca. How many kids do you have now? Five kids, oh, wow, that's not. That's not bad, that's okay. Elon's got what 20. You gotta get. Gotta get to work, gotta get to work, gotta get to work. Yeah, and uh, mike elgin, our good friend from oaxaca, where the coffee is hot and the croissants are even hotter. He's literally on the roof above a French bakery. That's right. I'm so jealous. I'm so jealous.

01:30:10
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01:32:50
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01:33:35 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, I did. It's a fun show.

01:34:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You see all this European stuff you don't normally see. Carry a bunch of lenses around with you. This is the xiaomi modular optical system with a 35 millimeter f 1.4 lens, 100 megapixel light fusion x sensor. It's a micro four-thirds sensor, uh, and a physical focus ring it's for the influencers, leo yeah, is it make a nice? Photo yeah, okay thanks for the video or whatever, yeah, of your lunch. Okay, uh, real me also had a DSLR lens.

01:34:35 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, this is not buy a camera, folks buy a freaking camera the DSLR no, actually this is benito, by the way, and this is actually so.

01:34:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't need to buy the body anymore, you just buy lenses now well, that's true, you just buy the glass, but I I still think that the full frame sensor I have on my cameras is going to be better than anything.

01:34:54 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I'm sure you're. Yes, you're full. This is a full frame throw down. But you know a micro four thirds can look pretty good. It gets a nice bokeh on that how about this?

01:35:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it sits on top of your laptop just like a camera, but it's not. It's a sun booster and it blasts light at your face so you don't get seasonal affect disorder. Um, I don't, can it? Could it really? Could this led powered by your usb give you the right? It has an. It has three 850 nanometer near infrared leds with narrow beam optics to direct it right, right into your face. But if you get up, it turns off. Okay, something, um, and it gives you a quote scientifically calibrated dose within two to three hours.

01:35:41 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Folks just go outside, Just go outside.

01:35:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's hard when it's cold in the winter. We're not all in Mexico, Mike.

01:35:47 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
We're in cold weather sometimes yeah, I guess.

01:35:51 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's where seasonal affective disorder comes in.

01:35:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's see. Here is I don't know why more companies don't do this a solar panel case for your phone. Probably you'd have to leave it in the sun for a long time and it probably just gives you, extends it a bit.

01:36:09 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
You can't charge the whole thing.

01:36:10 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Samsung had a solar panel laptop as well, which is a great concept.

01:36:14 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
honestly, it's a good idea but you have more surface area on a laptop. But again, using a laptop in the sun is not a good experience. It needs to be a hat right. They have those as well.

01:36:25 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
They have that power generator yeah how about this soul cooler?

01:36:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it can cool or heat your feet. Oh, goes right in the shoe I could. Yeah, actually this is a good thing to sell at mobile world congress because people are like their feet are killing them. That's where your audience is. It can uh, it can heat your feet by up to four degrees celsius or cool, by the same amount.

01:36:50
That's pretty nice that'd be nice in georgia summers, to be honest, yeah when you walk around, do you feel like, gee, I wish I had a dash cam, this is a dash actually. Yes, you put on your shirt, yeah, in case you run into people.

01:37:07 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I guess I don't know and this is, this is like the video version of that thing on your wrist, leo.

01:37:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just yeah, harvesting, bring up everything actually there is a rumor apple's working on putting cameras in their airpods. I do think that that's coming right. You were a glass hole, right, mike?

01:37:23 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Oh, I'm a Ray-Ban meta hole now.

01:37:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's right.

01:37:26 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I wear them all the time. They're fantastic and I've been in fact walking around, I'm using their experimental features, which are live translation, live AI and the other one is basically, you know, just recognize music when you hear it, and I'm using all of those. Oh, that's cool and they're fantastic. The live translation is something I've seen reviewers do without actually being in another country. I've used it in both Sicily and here in Mexico and it's pretty amazing. It's pretty great. It's not perfect.

01:37:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you have to wait, right. So that's the only thing is. You look like I'm wearing mine right now. You, you know it's and you have to wait. Uh, right, so that's the only thing is. You look like I'm wearing mine right now. You look like a doofus while somebody says something, you go working.

01:38:06 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Well, I mean, I'm used to looking like a doofus because I don't speak italian or well, that's true.

01:38:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now you at least will understand them, yeah it's.

01:38:13 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
The biggest problem is sometimes it won't pick up the conversation of the person right in front of you and sometimes it picks up the conversation on the other. I was in a restaurant the other day and the other side of this big restaurant this couple was playing pool and I was getting every single thing they said about the pool.

01:38:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know they're oh, that's kind of interesting. Yeah, so it was good for eavesdropping yeah, by the way, this little thing I wear does understand foreign languages, but it doesn't tell you what it hears, it's just.

01:38:43 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, so I got my Meta AI glasses on. I love them actually. I think they're just fantastic and they're comfortable and I just don't have, you know, any problem wearing these all the time and people don't care, they don't notice anything, nobody minds. They're way better than google glass in that, in that respect, and I can take pictures, uh, all the time. But live ai is really something you just turn on live and it's watching through your camera and you know, and you just ask questions and you know.

01:39:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's it. Yes, that's the idea behind this b computer, which is that down the road, if, if everything has been recorded, I will be able to you know ask questions about what I said, it about things, or what I agreed to do, or stuff like that. Right now it's not quite as useful. It does make it to-do list for me, but I'm I'm planning for the future, because if I wear this for a few years, as the, the AI models get better, this is going to get more and more useful.

01:39:41 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Right, but I mean for somebody who travels. I was walking around in some obscure little town yesterday and just everything's in Spanish, obviously, and so I would just look at a sign and say what does that say in English? Just tell me. And I would say what kind of business is this? And it would just tell me what's the significance of this giant tree in the middle of the town, and and went into detail about the tree- and your glasses actually look pretty good.

01:40:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Those are they don't have for one thing and they don't have the ray ban in the on the lens. That mine do.

01:40:08 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I don't I don't like that, do they?

01:40:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I also have transition lenses, so they get they're a little sunglassy right now, yeah, yeah I might have to order some newer ones. This, these don't even fit my head, really.

01:40:21 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I mean it's kind of tight.

01:40:23 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I have a very big head.

01:40:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Me too. I don't know if they make wide enough ones for me.

01:40:28 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But you know, the beauty of being our age, leo, is that we don't have to give up flying. I don't. That's what we look like.

01:40:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, who cares when I wear these?

01:40:39 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, I look like Buddy Holly if he had lived. Yeah, exactly, you know.

01:40:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
AMD finally has, says Devendra Hardwar, a decent NVIDIA killer. You tested the new 9070 from Radeon. So this is. I mean, nvidia dominates not just in GPUs for gaming, but in every other use Bitcoin mining and AI and so forth but you think AMD can compete?

01:41:11 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I think so. I think with these cards. And it's interesting because I've been following both AMD and NVIDIA for years and for years I've been reviewing the Radeon cards they put out and I just have to keep saying, like this is good, this is fine, but it's not as good as what you could get from the same price from Nvidia. You know, I just have to be honest. And now this year Nvidia is in kind of a bit of a fumble with some of their cards the 5070 that I just reviewed. Yeah, they're melting, Well, they're melting, but also it wasn't an impressive leap over the previous 4070 cards.

01:41:42
The 4070 Ti is really good if you can find that, but they're also getting super expensive. They're expensive, plus retailers are pricing them up. Scalpers are making them go way more expensive. If you can get these Radeon cards for $549 or $599 for the 9070 XT, they're pretty capable. They're fast for 1440p and 4K. They do a bit of ray tracing. They don't do the upscaling as well as the NVIDIA's cards, but there is some of that there. So I think for a lot of people like, these are going to be pretty good mid-range cards and maybe a good sign. Maybe it's a good sign for where AMD is headed, because right now they're more about um integrated stuff. Right, they they integrate their gpus into, like the playstation and the xbox, like they're in devices that you don't really where, you don't really think about the video cards, whereas nvidia is, like has always dominated the sort of, like you know, aftermarket gpu market. So maybe this will be a good switch up for amd and, uh, yeah, maybe good signs ahead for them. How are they?

01:42:38 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
with. How are they with the drivers? I think that's one big thing with AMD is they've continued to successfully do badly at driver development. So I think that's.

01:42:48 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I used to feel like I was cursed reviewing AMD cards. There was one card I think it was like the R9 Fury X from a while ago just wouldn't boot on my system. Just I'd plug it in, just wouldn't launch. And then yeah, yeah, I would always have a hard driver failures as well these cards. I've not had many issues. I've had maybe one crash in avowed which could have been a driver crash, but otherwise like pretty solid yeah well, how about integrated graphics?

01:43:10
both intel and apple are claiming that the built-in graphics uh on their newer chips are good enough well, in the intel stole one of the Radeon like lead Radeon designers, raja Koduri, who I think has left Intel now but they stole him to do they're doing-.

01:43:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Iris yeah.

01:43:30 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, they're doing GPUs as well as like their better integrated graphics Though they're not bad and, honestly, amd has done integrated Radeon stuff for a while too, and that's always been pretty decent. So, even when it comes to super cheap cards, intel just put out those b580 arc gps which are like 250 and pretty fine for like 1080p gaming. So that's not integrated, but it's still doing pretty well.

01:43:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah I ordered the uh framework. Cute little desktop, uh PC with a amda. It's got an AMD AI Ryzen in it, yes, the AI Max Ryzen, ai Max chip and it has a dedicated GP, not a dedicated, an integrated GPU, but it also can access 96 gigs of RAM integrated RAM integrated RAM, so it's unified ram which is very important. When it comes to ai, yes, 96 gigs of ram from nvidia would not be cheap, right?

01:44:27 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
tens of thousands yeah, so okay interesting interesting like this is a big war and listen. I sat and I listened to all two and a half hours of her. However long long Jensen Huang's CES keynote was, and that seemed like a weird moment for them because they were so leaning on AI and then they also announced these cards and really, with the hype of AI upscaling and maybe it's not fully living up to what he was selling at the point at that point, I should.

01:44:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was remiss. We talked a little bit about alexis ohanian getting in on the project liberty bid for a tick tock. We didn't talk about, though, what's going on. There doesn't seem to be, it seems. It seems the administration has basically forgotten the whole thing well they also.

01:45:14 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
They fully ignored a law that was passed by congress. I don't know where we are right now.

01:45:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, uh, there, I mean there is a deadline, uh, but I think the president could extend it again, probably would extend it again, uh, but uh, and I think they, they said, uh that the vice president vance was going to be doing the negotiation, but he hasn't actually great, he's been busy doing other things, I guess they're gonna wear a suit.

01:45:45 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I guarantee you they'll wear a suit and say thank you often.

01:45:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, yes, uh, beijing hasn't said anything, right? Um? So april 5th is the technically the deadline for the 75 day extension. But of course they're just President Trump extended it without any legal authority, so there's no reason for him not to just say, yeah, yeah, let's, we'll give him another 75 days. He likes it now for two reasons. One uh, of course he his campaign had an effective TikTok presence. But maybe more importantly, one of the biggest GOP donors, jeff Yass, has like 25% of the TikTok stock and I think he probably put a little bee in the presence here. What?

01:46:35 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
What?

01:46:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or you think he could be bought and sold. No, I wouldn't say that, but I think he said you know it would be. It would be nice if, uh, if, we could keep, if we could keep tiktok around. Uh, there's a proposal from senator markey, uh, to push back the deadline by another 270 days. So congress is very confused. Do you remember and I was, I was not completely behind this, but that we were told that the intelligence community knew some terrible, terrible things about tiktok? And if you only knew what they knew, you would want it to be banned too I thought that was b BS too.

01:47:20 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
You know, like that that whole situation was not great, but now it's just like layer upon layer of garbage.

01:47:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah uh, trump has also said. You know, this week he uh, he inaugurated the US Sovereign wealth fund using Bitcoin, or something he said we should. We should use that to buy tick tock. He said we should use that to buy TikTok. I'm sorry, I don't think that'll happen either. Actually, the crypto community is a little miffed because, while the president did create a cryptocurrency strategic reserve, he didn't buy any of their Bitcoin, thereby liquidating him. He just stuck the stuff we have from you know confiscations of silk road and other places.

01:48:04 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, there's a kernel of a good idea there. Just take the, the cryptocurrencies that have been confiscated and throw them into a thing and let them. You know, maybe they'll grow in size and then maybe they'll grow.

01:48:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But what if it doesn't? I guess it doesn't matter. We didn't put any money into it they've've been seized.

01:48:20 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
What's shady is all the other coins that have been thrown in there. A lot of people just think it should be Bitcoin, including the coins associated with Trump's own cryptocurrency, did he?

01:48:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
put his meme coins in there. The Trump and Melania coins, no, but there's Solana, xrp and Cardano.

01:48:39 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, Come on. I mean either include all of them that have been confiscated by federal law enforcement or include one of them.

01:48:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Honestly, I have no problem with it if he doesn't spend taxpayers' money buying more. Spend taxpayers money buying more because that really is just about making his you know, the cryptocurrency donors whole by trading their cryptocurrency for dollars. Um, anyway, we'll see. We'll see what happens. Let's take a little break. Got more to talk about, got a great panel to talk about it. Lou, maresca, lou, mm. What are you? What are you doing now? Your principal ai engineering manager that's a big job.

01:49:25 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Yeah, actually we're doing this huge shift right now. We're moving to what we call ourselves instead of software engineers, we're moving to ai engineers.

01:49:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um you, um you, you. Last time we talked, we're putting python in excel.

01:49:37 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
That's what yeah, that'm still leading that group of driving Python and advanced analytics in Excel using Python, using AI, basically.

01:49:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And are you working with Copilot Microsoft?

01:49:49 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Are you working with?

01:49:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft's own models or MAI.

01:49:53 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
We have a barrage of them, but mostly fine-tuned, very specific models for advanced analysis, analysis basically. So our own version of it all right, you get to do.

01:50:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're on the cutting edge, you get to do the good stuff. How fun. Um, well, it's nice to have you. Lou. Thank you for being here. We missed this week in enterprise tech was a great show. You did a great job with it, but uh, as you know, we had to cut back quite a bit. Uh, trying to keep make ends meet, as they say also here. Davinder hardwar from a gadget. Great to have you. Senior editor, you've been there. How long?

01:50:31
it was uh man, 10 years as of last year, wow, wow yeah, that in the, in the modern blog space, 10 years is a lifetime. That's incredible, it's wild. Yeah, yeah, congratulations, thank you, yeah, and Mike Elgin, who was one of the first people I ever met, who has no besides. The Unabomber has no known abode.

01:50:56 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah and yeah, we travel full time. Amir and I have been doing it for many years. We took a break to work for twit for two years and um oh yeah, that's right.

01:51:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I forgot that time.

01:51:06 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah you worked for us.

01:51:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right, yeah, yeah.

01:51:09 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Who hasn't? So we all have at some point. But uh, but, uh, yeah, I mean we we travel full time and uh, you know, know, we own some real estate and stuff like that in the us, but like we just love traveling and we could you live in that real estate, or is it?

01:51:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know? You bought land in oregon, right, or something like that? Washington, yeah, washington, yeah. Have you built anything there yet?

01:51:30 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
no, we don't haven't built anything. It's under the forestry designation, which is really low uh subsidized uh taxes so, but you could live there or no. No, we could build a house there. Yeah for sure. Yeah, literally during COVID, we spent so much time in Oaxaca that we got so addicted to this weather that we could never live in southern Washington. It's so gray. No offense to you Washingtonians who love the drizzly, but the property that we have there gets 60 inches of rain a year which is more than California gets in a in a in a in a century.

01:52:03
But um, but yeah we're. We're here in Oaxaca doing the Oaxaca experience. It's really fantastic. If anybody thinks that Mexicans are like bitter and angry at the U? S for our politics. Don't think that, because they're very pleasant and always very wonderful and uh and fantastic, fantastic. So gastronomadnet.

01:52:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When's, when is the next? Uh, you're, you're gonna have to leave right and go somewhere to to do the well tuesday.

01:52:28 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Tuesday, we're doing oaxaca, the oaxaca experience. Oh, perfect, okay, and uh, we've got some really fun stuff lined up and really like we know, as you know leo, we know everybody and and in town and and uh, we just eat like kings and uh, explore the whole scene here.

01:52:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll never forget going to the market with chef alex. Yeah, we, you know the thing that they don't. They don't tell you what you're going to do, so they just everybody in the van and, uh, we drove up to the market and said, oh great it's. You know, it's a market and it was big. It's like an open air giant, open air farmer's market. And this guy shows up. He says I'm Chef Alex. Turns out he's the most famous chef in Oaxaca.

01:53:07 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
By far, by far, yeah, and he's posing for pictures, signing autographs and stuff like that. Yeah, we're walking through the place.

01:53:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody knows him, yeah. And we went shopping and shopping and we thought, oh, this is fun, we're going shopping with a famous chef. And then he took us out into the country where he has a giant hacienda where, with a kitchen and everything, and we made dinner, we caught grasshoppers and everything. It was so much fun that's right, that's right.

01:53:33 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
So much fun, oh my gosh, and they kept pouring mezcal, that's the, the only thing, I remember, and I don't remember much after that.

01:53:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It never stops.

01:53:44 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
There was a big party. There was a big party, if you recall, on Day of the Dead, and it was like late into the night and we were drinking mezcal all day and you took a little five-minute nap.

01:53:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amongst the grasshoppers.

01:53:57 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yes exactly it was yes, yeah, but it's a lot of fun and we we now do sicily and tuscany and some other places. We still do mexico city. So I just you know, if you want to enjoy this beautiful culture in mexico without tariffs, I I highly recommend oh, that's right you if you're in mexico.

01:54:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There are no tariffs. Yeah, bypass gastronomadnet. Morocco's coming up. Uh, tuscany is so much fun. There's small groups, there's just a few couples, that's right. El salvador, prosecco hills, mexico city you know paul thurot from windows weekly. Uh, pretty much doesn't ever want to leave mexico city.

01:54:35 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Now he's like it's the most wonderful city and I follow on on a couple of social networks and he really gets it. He's always going to these amazing restaurants and seeing all the beautiful sites. Mexico City is such a gem and we recently wrote a newsletter about the, the hot cuisine, the high end, highly sophisticated part of the Mexico City food scene which is unparalleled I mean just absolutely fantastic. So if you love, like super high-end dining, mexico city is just the gem of a city okay, I forgot that there are no tariffs if you're in mexico.

01:55:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you're in mexico and and.

01:55:12
Once you can get past that wall, right, you're just in there yeah, that big wall, that big beautiful wall that they paid for, yeah, uh, also, uh, did I say all three of you? Did I say devendra, yes, I did, I got mike and I got lou. Okay, now we could take a break. I just want to say hi to everybody, catch up a little bit. Our show today, brought to you by netsuite uh, have we've talked about this before? You know, when you listen to this show, we talk a lot about what's going on today, but what does the future hold, especially for business? And there it's really hard to get a consensus. You ask nine experts, you're gonna get 10 answers. Rates will fall or or rise, inflation's up or or down. Can someone invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 41 000 businesses have future-proofed their business with netsuite from oracle, the number one cloud erp, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and hr into one fluid platform. And there's a real advantage to this with one unified business management suite. There's a real advantage to this. With one unified business management suite, there's a single source of truth, giving you the visibility and the control you need to make quick decisions. With real-time insights and forecasting. You're peering into the future with actionable data when you're closing the books in days, not weeks. You're spending less time looking back and more time on what's next. If I had needed this product, it's what I'd use, whether your company's earning millions or even hundreds of millions. Netsuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunity, if you go there right now, you can download the cfo's guide to ai and machine learning. Everybody wants to know what's coming up with that. Netsuitecom slash twit. The guide's free. Just go to NetSuitecom slash twit. N-e-t-s-u-i-t-e dot com slash twit. We thank NetSuite for their support of this week in tech.

01:57:22
Utah has passed the first. We knew this was going to come eventually. The first, uh, us app age store verification law age app store. I got that twisted the first app store age verification law. There's been quite a movement among social networks and Mike Zuckerberg and others saying hey, don't make us verify ages. The App Store should do that and we'll go along with whatever they say. Does this make sense to burden the App Store with this?

01:57:59 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
No, no no.

01:58:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The answer is no. Utah, on Wednesday, became the first state to pass legislation requiring app stores to verify users' ages and to get parental consent for minors to download apps for their device. So it goes even a little bit farther. Um, now, it hasn't been signed yet, but the legislation has been passed. I presume it will sign, will become a law. I don't know how the app stores comply in just one state, yeah I mean it's.

01:58:34 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's a very difficult problem and the problem could be placed at the feet of government itself. It could be placed at the feet of individual app developers, or it could be placed at the feet of Apple and Google and the people who run the app stores, and that's where it's been placed by Utah.

01:58:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple's not happy. They say. Requiring app stores to confirm ages will make it so. All users have to hand over sensitive identifying information a driver's license or a passport or credit card, or even a social security number even if they're not trying to use an age restricted app.

01:59:09 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
One, how are they going to enforce it? And two, I agree with Mike Wherever it happens, it's going to be difficult, they have to store that data. Wherever it happens, it's going to be difficult, they have to store that data. So if you're now saying every app has to do this at the app level, that means now they have to store the sensitive data somewhere and you know that that's going to be a privacy and security problem.

01:59:23 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, and the app developers are. You know, the big app developers like Meta and Snap and X love this because it's not their problem anymore. That's the whole point, isn't it?

01:59:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the bill was sponsored by uh senator todd weiler of utah. He said, quote it's a lot easier to target two app stores than it is to target 10 000 app developers. Well, that's true. That's true.

01:59:47
Under the bill, app stores would be required to request age information when someone creates an account if a minor tries to open an account, the bill directs the app store to link it to their parents account and may request a form of id from the parents to confirm their identity. If a child tries to download an app that allows in-app purchases or requires them to agree to terms and conditions, the parent will have to approve but I feel like that that they need to know I'm an adult, then right, so then that means that to approve Speaker 2.

02:00:21
Speaker 3 Speaker 2 Speaker 1 Speaker 2 Speaker 2 Speaker 1 Speaker 2 Speaker 2 Speaker 2 Speaker 1 Speaker 2 Speaker 2 Speaker 1 Speaker 2 Speaker 2 Speaker 1 Speaker 2 Speaker 2 Speaker 1 Speaker 2 Speaker 2 Speaker 2 Speaker 1 Speaker 2 Speaker 2 Speaker 2 Speaker 2. The governor hasn't yet said whether he will, but he did support the state law currently on hold that requires age verification on social media, so it's probable that he'll sign. This is going to be very interesting to see what happens.

02:00:47 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Will.

02:00:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple do what it did in England and just say okay, no app store for you.

02:00:51 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
No, there's no way they'll do that and worry about the sizable Utah market over there.

02:00:57 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But there are eight other states that are working on similar things, so this is just Utah. Nobody's ever said this sentence before, but Utah is ahead of the curve here.

02:01:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Such a bad idea. I understand people want to do something with social media and helping parents, you know, keep an eye on their kids and stuff, but isn't I don't know, let me ask again and helping parents keep an eye on their kids and stuff, but isn't I don't know, let me ask again, I'm sorry, devendra and Lou get to be the parents on this show. What would you like? What do you want? What would work for you?

02:01:27 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean, it's always about conversations, like it's conversations with the kids about the apps they're using and how they're using it, and I don't feel I feel like this kind of offloads some of the parental discussions around this stuff about how kids use their technology. So no, I don't think this is the answer, and I'm also like an informed enough reporter to know like, oh yeah, you're going to need a lot of data to make this work and I don't trust you, at least at this point, with making any of this work. So yeah, right now, my daughter her main competing device is an iPad and she plays Minecraft, you know, and we have a discussion when she wants to get a new world or something in Minecraft and that's that's how we do it. Maybe eventually she'll start trying to do that on her own, but she's not making purchases because I'm paying for the Minecraft subscription so she could just go and like, get, like you know, things pretty easily there, but that's the extent to her right now. Maybe in a couple of years it's going to be much different.

02:02:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is parental controls enough?

02:02:20 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Lou.

02:02:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, is it don't? Don't, don't iPhones offer parental control?

02:02:22 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Some of them don't. I mean, it depends on how you set it up, but I mean I would say for me I'm with Vindra that's more about parental oversight, having the conversation and, I think, having five kids who have, you know, obviously I have to have five devices and they all logged in differently and they all do different things. I mean we were talking about this a while ago around YouTube kids. I mean, even that has bad material on it that I have to continue to, you know, look at it and make sure I have oversight on what they're watching and why they're watching it and what kind of material are they trying. So I feel like the tools that will never catch up here. I think it continues to have to be the parents' idea.

02:02:55 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Here's a stat for you Among children under 13,. Tiktok is for 13 and older. 68.2% of children under 13 use TikTok.

02:03:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah Well, they shouldn't Gosh, darn it, and I'm going to make sure they don't.

02:03:11 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But you know it's like they have the rule that you have to be 13 to use TikTok and yet it doesn't matter.

02:03:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody follows that rule.

02:03:17 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
What does it mean by use TikTok too? Because I sit and watch TikTok videos with my kids. Sometimes I'm like they're using it, but also I'm directing exactly how that experience is going.

02:03:25 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But you're a perfect example of the truism that thoughtful people are full of doubts, oh yeah, and the unthoughtful majority is just full speed ahead. The fact is we talk about.

02:03:37
the people who listen to this show and watch this show are early adopters. They adapt quickly to new technologies for the most part. But we need, culturally, even if people are not technologists, they need to get with the program about how to be a parent in the age that we live in, and this is one part of it. Like you know, like you're saying, I wish everybody took the attitude you did, Devendra of, like you know, have a conversation, make sure you're paying attention to your kids, all that kind of stuff. I think most parents are kind of living in the past, for lack of a better term.

02:04:09 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I've seen some families give like their kids, their accounts, so like their iphone accounts on their phones. So like they're buying things in their own app stores. They're they're purchasing they shouldn't, they're viewing things they shouldn't, so they just kind of it's a wild west from most people.

02:04:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the supreme court is probably going to get to weigh in on this. I'm certain that if the governor of utah signs the law, the apple and google and net choice will appeal it and it'll always. It'll go all the way up to the supreme court. That you may remember, the texas state legislature in 2023 passed a age verification requirement for porn sites, which was which the court decided to. Google's helping me. I don't know why I wasn't talking to you, but I like you and you're a nice person. A federal court in austin issued a temporary injunction barring them from enforcing that age verification, but now it's going on to the supreme court. They heard arguments in January. We will see. In the past, similar laws have been, uh, cast down by the Supreme Court.

02:05:22 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, uh constitutional. The porn sites affected in Texas, just like left.

02:05:27 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Pornhub just doesn't work in Texas yeah, they've left many I think 20 some states for the same reason and now and now, porn enthusiasts only have a hundred thousand other sites that they can use, and they've been restricted to those hundred thousand well, it's also really helped the sales of express vpn in those states, I would imagine.

02:05:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just saying I don't know, um. So the the uh supreme court actually, uh, in 2004 said the Child Online Protection Act was unconstitutional Ashcroft versus ACLU and the Court of Appeals, when it barred the state, said it was a very similar situation. So we shall see. We're going to get back in Kathy Gellis's area with strict scrutiny and all of that, but I have a feeling the Supreme Court would end up having to rule. Whether they would rule in a way that we agree is a good idea, I don't know. We'll watch with interest.

02:06:27
Watch this space. Did you know that there's something even lower Earth orbit than low Earth orbit satellites? Lower earth orbit than low earth orbit satellites? Uh, very low earth orbit satellites are probably going to be launched soon, maybe even as soon as this week. This is from ours technica. A handful of new space companies have now plans to develop small and medium-sized satellites designed to survive in vleo, very low earth orbit, which is problematic because they're they're actually they're between 400 and 800 kilometers, 250 miles high, which means they do get a little bit of atmospheric drag they contend with some atmosphere, which is both a benefit and a problem.

02:07:14 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
they to take better pictures. They're closer, it's quicker, everything that you want from a satellite is better, and with solar power and stuff like that and electrical engines they can sort of maintain that. And if something happens and they malfunction, they're already in the atmosphere, they get captured and they burn up.

02:07:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's easy to get rid of them.

02:07:33 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
You're not leaving the space junk, so that's kind of a nice feature. They burn up, so it's easy to get rid of them you're not leaving the space junk.

02:07:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's a kind of a nice feature. It's kind of a weird feature, like well, the good thing about this satellite is it's easy to get it to burn up. Dies early. Yeah, it dies early. So the clarity uh, one it's is. Uh is from a company called albedo and may well be launched this week at between a 500 600 kilometer orbit, which will then uh lower itself to the operational orbit 170 miles high. That means very clear pictures. That's spy plane altitude, right, that's right it's. It's lifetime is about five years. Uh, albedo recently won a contract from the air force research lab. Uh, albedo recently won a contract from the air force research lab to share the vleo specific on-orbit data. This is are we just launching better spy satellites? Is that what this is for?

02:08:25
always and space tax is also interested in in yeah, it's going to go up on a falcon spacex, falcon but they also want nine satellites yeah altitude um cost.

02:08:38 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
These are these expensive because they're only a five years of life cycle.

02:08:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That seems very like you know well, the air force is paying for it, so it's okay to say that we are paying for it.

02:08:49 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Oh us, yeah, um so, uh, yeah, I mean, there are of course other customers, you know farmers and other people well, also potentially this this could be just the expansion of the uh, of something that has been expanding already, which is using satellites directly with your smartphone, and so you could get to it yeah, I have that on my, on my iphone.

02:09:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now t-mobile has done a deal with uh starlink and it's.

02:09:20 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I haven't ever used it because it's not cheap, it's not free right, but that if with the expansion of this it gets more affordable, more usable and more circumstances and so on, and so we start to sort of narrow down the, the places on earth when you can't get a connection. Smart cities is great for that. Scientific research could be great for all kinds of things just more stuff in the sky blocking the stars.

02:09:46
That's what I'd like. The you know, there's this. What do they call that? Uh, scenario where the satellites start crashing against each other like billiard balls and create a cascading range of space. The.

02:09:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kessler syndrome yeah.

02:10:00 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
So this altitude of satellite is not participating in that.

02:10:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's good.

02:10:06 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, but I mean this could happen any day. So just to let everybody know, if some satellite blows up or crashes into another satellite, the debris from those could hit other satellites. What a relief. The debris from those could hit other satellites.

02:10:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What a relief.

02:10:18 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
The debris from those could hit other satellites and we could just have just massive destruction.

02:10:22 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's like the opening from WALL-E.

02:10:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly, neil Stevenson wrote a novel about that Seven Eves, seven Eves. Yeah, really good, really loved it. Did you like the ending? I recall I recall, yeah, it kind of left you kind of hanging, but that's okay, that's Neil's specialty.

02:10:40 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's what he does.

02:10:42 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
That's what he does.

02:10:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just hanging, just hanging like space junk.

02:10:46 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
You should really talk to Kim Stanley Robinson because I like how he's been doing his sort of like future science fiction stuff these days.

02:10:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He wrote a very nice trilogy about Mars. Pete yes, pete. I remember that I really liked Pete A while ago.

02:10:58 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
A while ago, pete yeah, pete, one of his more recent ones was Ministry of the Future, and it is a very, very gripping depiction of like a climate future. The first chapter alone is like this one of the things that we will most likely live through, pete.

02:11:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember I decided not to read that Pete.

02:11:16 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Now I know why you're so depressed now. I'm just looking outside, I'm just reading the news. Give me the blue pill.

02:11:22 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I don't want to remember nothing no, I don't want to know I don't want to know.

02:11:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, youtube has uh premium and music has now surpassed 125 million subscribers. You know why that is. You can't watch YouTube unless you subscribe. It's useless without it.

02:11:42
It's so horrible. They are going to add this is the good news. They're going to add a cheaper ad-free tier because you get music at the same time as you get the ad-free. I don't really need the music. I got all kinds of other sources for music. It's really kind of a trick. So they're going to have a ad, a less expensive ad, free youtube for eight dollars a month instead of fourteen dollars a month. Worth it. But yeah, there will be some ads. There'll be ads on music videos, uh, which is fine.

02:12:11 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Totally I'll probably do that. Youtube premium is fantastic. Like it sucks that the price has kept getting higher and higher. But it you cannot use youtube without it. It makes it usable yeah, it like it makes youtube also like kind of miraculous too, just in terms of what you can find and how quickly you can access it.

02:12:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So let me take one last break and then a couple of final thoughts and a farewell uh, I'm sorry to say to somebody I think many of you cherish. But first a word from our sponsor, coda. Do you know about Coda? Turning your back of a napkin idea into a billion-dollar startup requires countless hours of collaboration and teamwork. It can be difficult to build a team that's aligned on everything from values to workflow, but that's where Coda comes in. Coda C-O-D-A is an all-in-one collaborative workspace that itself started as a sketch on the back of a napkin. Now, in five years that's since it launched its beta Coda has helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. I tell you, everybody I talk to who uses Coda loves it. With Coda, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications and, yes, of course, the intelligence of AI, and it's all built for enterprise. Coda's seamless workspace facilitates deeper collaboration and quicker creativity, giving you more time to build. I think you'll be very impressed.

02:13:40
Go to Codaio and take a look at just some of the things people are using it for. If you're a startup team and you're looking to increase alignment and agility, I wish we'd had it when we started Twit. To be honest, coda can help you move from planning to execution in record time. Try it for yourself. Go to codaio slash twit today. Get six free months of the team plan for startups. That's codaio slash twit. Get started for free and that's a pretty good deal six months free of the team plan there's no reason not to try it. Codaio slash twit. Let me thank them so much for their support of twit. They didn't have coda 20 years ago when we started twit. They didn't have anything like it. Uh, when we started twit um, and we are coming up on our anniversary, the 20th anniversary show what did we decide? Was it April 13th, I think, benito? Do you remember? I should be keeping track of this.

02:14:45
I think April 15th or 17th was the first twit. So let me look at the calendar. I guess, yeah, the 13th would be the closest to that. So here's what we've decided to do. You know we already, on our thousandth episode, had the old gang return, the original hosts on the very first episode of twit. So we're not going to do that again.

02:15:06
But we realize the most important part of this whole Network and of all of our shows I know you know this uh Lou is the as our community, the, the people who watch and listen and participate with us and chat with us. They're fantastic. You know it too, mike. A lot of the people on the Gastro Nomad Adventures are from the Twit community, like BA and Princeton, here in our, in our club Twit Discord, and I think Devendra, you might know it because I think you've been a part of that community practically since the very beginning.

02:15:36
So what we're going to do is we're going to ask you to uh to skeet or tweet or uh toot what do they call it on threads, I don't know read, go to your social and post a video about when you first started watching, how you watch any you have. I want to collect a bunch of videos from our community and that's what I want to celebrate on our 20th anniversary tweet on Sunday, april 13th, and if you want to be part of that broadcast, you could also just email him. Should I give him your address, benito?

02:16:15
No, please no, no, not my address all right, you can email me, leo, at leovillecom, if you've got a video. Don't send the video, just send a link, put it on a cloud somewhere and send me a video. I want to collect them and we'll play as many as we can. I mean, it's only a three-hour show but we'll play as many as we can. Uh, on april 13th now, I think it'd be really fun yeah, tell me.

02:16:37 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean no, I will, I will, I will send it will you record one?

02:16:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that would be nice we'll totally record one.

02:16:41 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
But I I do distinctly remember I was working in it at the time and I would be stuck in our basement with just like inventorying stuff and like removing dell motherboards and you were blasting on the speakers. So that is a distinct memory I had.

02:16:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah so I think we have accounts at twit accounts all over uh the various socials, uh, instagram too. So just you know, post it and at twit it and uh, and we will, uh we'll scour the internet for people's uh memories of the earliest days of twit 20 years, it's kind of hard to believe. Uh, we've been, we've been doing that. Yeah, it's crazy, it is. I certainly. When we started in 2005, I didn't think oh yeah, 20 years from now, I'll be collecting videos from our audience.

02:17:25 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
We were barely able to get Skype to work in those days you were just thinking okay, this will hold me over till my next TV show that's exactly what I was thinking.

02:17:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
God, I hope I get another job. Uh, I never did need another job, actually, I'm very grateful for that. That's exactly what I was thinking. God, I hope I get another job. Uh, I never did need another job, actually, I'm very grateful for that. That's nice not to have to look for work. That's really nice. I'm very grateful to our audience, really. Uh, we, you know, we do it. Uh, because you let us, because you invite us into your homes and lives and and that makes it fun for all of us. So, thank you. Lives and and that makes it fun for all of us. So thank you. Uh, the Justice Department has weighed in.

02:18:01
Even under Trump, they still want Google to sell Chrome. That you know. I think Google probably thought that under the new administration, this whole thing might just go away with Lena Khan, but it has not. And in fact, they're still saying yeah, google, you need to break up, and one of the ways we still want to do it is to sell chrome. Is that does that? I've asked this before. Does it even make sense? How do you sell chrome? What are you? What are you selling? You know?

02:18:33 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I, I don't think chrome is. You're selling basically the browser I don't know about, like the open source project is like a whole separate thing.

02:18:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you can't sell.

02:18:42 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Chromium. Chrome is in a bad state because I've had this bug for like the past month where all my webcams going through like video chat things within Chrome just do not work well, they're all stuttering. So, like I think Chrome development has been a pain. Uh, memory it's still a memory hog, so imagine if it could be a separate thing that was, like you know, optimized and outside of google's reigns.

02:19:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That could be interesting, honestly, well, and this deal would allow google to create a new browser within five years, so you know it would be.

02:19:11 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
This is cream I was the editor of windows magazine in the 90s when the DOJ was going after Microsoft and wanted to separate the browser from Windows, and the whole thing is exactly playing out in exactly the same way, just as events and the evolution of the industry is making it so that it doesn't matter if you put IE in Windows, you're going to come and separate it. I mean because of Google's dominance in search. Are you kidding? They're about to lose their dominance in search because of AI.

02:19:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly, it's already closing the door after the horse has left.

02:19:47 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, and they've been accused by the European regulators and the US regulators of gaming and the search results and all that kind of stuff. I don't understand what Chrome has to do with any of this stuff.

02:20:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they say this is the government. It says Chrome is quote an important search access point. So this is to provide an opportunity for a new rival to operate a significant gateway to search the internet using Google, free of google's monopoly control yeah, it's it.

02:20:19 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
You know you used to talk about monopolies and, of course, at&t is always the. You know, mob bell and all this stuff is always the big example the the idea that you can switch off of google search in less than one second with your finger using a, you know, using a touchpad, just I don't see the lock in there. People choose no lock in. I'm using one second with your finger using a, you know, using a touch pad, just I don't see the lock in there. People choose.

02:20:43 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I'm using Google search in two years I think I think most people. The problem is Google is the default everywhere. They paid Apple so much money to make that 20 billion a year, you can change it. But who's going to change it, you know, aside from the listeners of this show?

02:20:57 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
uh, people don't change it because they don't want to change it and they don't know.

02:21:00 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
They can't, they don't know. There's an alternative default everywhere.

02:21:03 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It's default on mac.

02:21:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not the default on windows windows it's edge right, yeah, but guess what edge is based on?

02:21:10 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
yeah right, the browser itself, right exactly, chromium being the most useless search engine in the world.

02:21:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amazing, yeah, yeah I'm telling you I use ai is perplexity, of course. Now I know that it's full of bs search engine.

02:21:23
Leo, yeah, it is, ai lies it's but you know the reason I use perplexity. It's there. It's a little frustrating because I'm so used to getting a link right to the things I want to right and it does give you links, but it, but, but it really deprecates the links to the res, the ai result, and I feel bad because it's stealing all this content. And I just read the content. I never have to go to the site, I can. There's footnotes, but honestly, you know, I'm trying to set up my arch machine over here and I have a question. I type it in. I never see the site it came from.

02:21:55 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
You're killing us, leo. You're killing us, I'm killing you you should make podcasts the window.

02:22:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, you do that we, we do nobody's nobody wants that.

02:22:05 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Nobody's stealing that but this is a great perspective from a, from a podcast person who has to get facts fast, live on air with a camera in their face, which is very hard to do. I've seen Leo do this. He can talk and read at the same time, which is like inconceivable to me, but like if you wanted some piece of information. You don't want a bunch of links.

02:22:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just need the answers.

02:22:27 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
You need the answers. Yeah, really understandable. I think a lot of people are using multiple AI resources plus Google search. There's a little trick that you can use Google search without all the cruft and all the AI garbage.

02:22:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, how do you do that yeah?

02:22:44 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
We can put it in the show notes or something.

02:22:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it DuckDuckGo?

02:22:48 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
No, no no, it's a specific.

02:22:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I know what you're talking about. Yeah, that link circulated. We actually put that out a few months ago or so.

02:22:56 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's when it was people were talking about it. Yeah, but really it's like you know, google doesn't need any help failing in the future.

02:23:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, they're doing great.

02:23:05 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
They're doing great on their own. They don't need help. And one of the things they're talking about restricting is the kind of deals that they with Apple. But again you're meddling in the voluntary deal-making between two companies which you know. Apple's going to cancel that as soon as they get Apple intelligence happening right. That's a dead man walking right there. So I just don't see the point.

02:23:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So much antitrust action is always too little too late, you'll put Mozilla out of business if you kill those payoffs, because that's what keeps Firefox goingfox going, the couple hundred million a year it gets from google. By the way, the justice department no longer wants google to sell android this is that could have been interesting. So remember, google has lost the trial already. The judge is trying to decide what the remedy is going to be.

02:23:53 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
He will decide in September, so I guess that's why it's still ongoing, because there's nothing the administration can do to kill it. It's done. It's also it's a weird company to split up, because everything ultimately leads back to search and search ads, you know. So it leads back to advertising, basically. So chopping off Chrome, chopping off Android, won't really do much to fix it. At the same time, I think Google is a deeply flawed company, like. I think it's weird structure right now is why it fails to produce many good products these days, because it's so focused on keeping the advertising business alive. They kind of were thrust into AI early because OpenAI kind of, you know, pushed them into it, but Google's a mess.

02:24:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I think it's pretty clear that google messed their because they decided to focus on profits, messed with their search results, which for so long were pure and clean, and no longer are they very good. Plus, google clearly favors its. I mean, youtube's right at the top, favors its own stuff over anything else. And then now google, by the way, is pushing out manifest v3 in chrome. Uh, this week many of you got chrome updates that disabled your ad blocker. You block origin. Um, that was I mean. If I were still using chrome, that would be the the end of the end.

02:25:14
I mean honestly, I, in fact I moved to firefox. Then there was a kerfuffle over firefox uh, privacy. So then I moved to arc, which is based on chrome. But then arc, the browser company, said, yeah, we can't, we're not gonna do arc anymore. So now I'm using an open source browser called the zen browser, which actually is the best of both worlds. It's the firefox blinksink engine with the Arc user interface. That's nice. I highly recommend it. It's open source, zen-browserapp, and I've changed its default search to perplexity.

02:25:49 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It doesn't have the whole Arc interface, does it? Does it have spaces and all that kind of stuff?

02:25:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it has the sidebar. See, here it is 'm? I'm using it right now. It's the sidebar like this it has spaces, it even when you click a link. It does one of the things that I really loved about Arc, which it. I didn't do it in this case, but it will pop up if I go to tech me. It pops up a little micro window on top of it, like Arc. Like arc, it's basically arc. The, the zen browser guy said let's just steal arc's user interface yeah, they're not using it they don't want it.

02:26:23
We'll take it and it's based, but it's firefox, uh, and it has all of it takes firefox extensions, including u block origin. All right, I'm doing that. I'm just really happy with it. It's yeah, it's good to see other browsers.

02:26:33 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Like I said, there is a chromium bug that is killing'm really happy with it.

02:26:35 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, it's good to see other browsers. Like I said, there is a Chromium bug that is killing me right now.

02:26:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's it doing?

02:26:41 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
So, as of a month or two ago, any webcam stream I do. I do use Zencastr and other tools to do produced podcasts. You do that in browser. It has screwed up all of my webcams. There's like frame rate jitteriness.

02:27:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's some weird stuttering. The only thing that fixes it is not using a chromium browser. It's just really hysterical. Yeah, because I, you know, we use uh restream also for some of our shows and they demand a chrome. They then use chrome, not even a chromium browser. They demand you use chrome, so I use chrome for that. Um, yeah, you know google. I don't understand how they they took. They like skype. They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

02:27:21 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I, it's I mean, it's a whole ego. It's really the people at the top, it's the management it's pursuing what they chose to pursue versus, like you know, innovating on new products. You bring in a company like nest and they just can't even thrive you know, within Google. Isn't it sad?

02:27:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's uh it is sad, it's really sad yeah, uh finally, we should end with a note of uh sadness for the loss of George Lowe. Now you may not know George Lowe's name, but people of your age, devendra and Benito's age age will very much remember Space Ghost. He was the voice of Space Ghost. That's a cunt Ow.

02:28:06 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Try biting me now. Ant From the afterlife.

02:28:11 - Conan (Announcement)
You know I've been interviewed by all of them. Regis, kathy Lee, that's Conan Regis.

02:28:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kathy Lee, that's Conan Regis, and.

02:28:17 - Conan (Announcement)
Kathy Lee Right, I'd like to say that I think this show is very bad, okay, and should be stopped. Oh, okay, I think you're a bad person and don't take this the wrong way, all right, but I think you represent evil, yeah, and your presence makes any kind of progress in the universe impossible. Hold on a second, conan.

02:28:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Moltar, this ant has come back from the dead. That is the great George Lowe, the voice of Space Ghost. Space Ghost RIP Coast to coast.

02:28:49 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
This is such a classic episode dude, this is Fire Ant and classic because these are people I grew up watching, like both conan and space ghost.

02:28:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that episode is so good your universes were colliding, weren't they?

02:29:01 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
they space coast, coast to coast, like go back um. I don't know if it's streaming anywhere these days, but you can buy these seasons on itunes. All of 90s pop culture is in there. There's one episode with tom york and bjork together it's just like, just like. So that's my teenage years. York and. Bjork. York and Bjork. York and Bjork.

02:29:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's hilarious. Lowe was 67 years old, far too young. He was an American voice actor and comedian, not only a space ghost, he did many other things.

02:29:33 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
He appeared in Aqua Teen, hunger Force and Robot Chicken, basically doing kind of riffs on the Space Ghost voice, all that same voice he was such a good company man Like he would dress up in costume and go to conventions in Space Ghost voice and just like riff with people and with fans Like a good dude. Space Ghost Coast to Coast made Adult Swim Basically like it was one of the first shows that they had produced Good stuff.

02:29:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, good stuff. What a loss. All right, there you go. Not well known, he was suffering health issues last year, passed away in Lakeland, florida, on March 2nd while recovering from a heart surgery procedure he underwent in November.

02:30:15 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
He had that classic radio voice which kind of like you do, leo, like he did, it's, it's you know voice and I could do it too, if I wanted to.

02:30:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All I have to do is cut my ear behind my hand or something like that, something like that.

02:30:29 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Now let me tell you Space Ghost and Conan like those were. Space Ghost was pretending to be a late night show. Conan had a real late night show and that has really influenced the way I I podcast honestly, in the way I produce shows so well if you ever need somebody to announce for you, I'd be glad to help davindra hard or tell us about the shows you do.

02:30:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know you do a film show which I love. Yes the film cast yeah, we're gonna be talking about um?

02:30:56 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
was it um the new bong joon-ho movie, mickey 17.

02:30:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, have you seen it? I'm dying to see it it's really good.

02:31:03 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I think it uh, it's maybe a little draggy and long in the middle, but it's a lot of fun, because I think bong joon-ho is just like a wonderful creative force is that who did parasite? You did, he did do Parasite and Snowpiercer which is an incredible film. The host one of my favorite working directors right now, so it is. You know it's like as crazy and wild as you expect from him.

02:31:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, mickey 7.

02:31:28 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
And it's about 17.

02:31:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's about replicants, right.

02:31:32 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Well, we kind of were bringing up this idea. It's the ultracarbon thing of like you capture a human and when they die, they reprint them back out with like the memories they had collected up to that point. So it's ultimately about very much similar to severance. It's about labor. It's about how you work and how people control. Is it on streaming yet, or do I have?

02:31:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
to go. You're going to go to theater, but you should go on theater for that movie. So did you see? And the oscars you? I'm sure you did. The, the director of, uh, nora, begging people, begging, begging them to go back to the theaters. There's nothing like it, he said. I just thought, dude, it's over you, it's not over, it's over.

02:32:09 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's over with that attitude, leo.

02:32:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's over, it's not I can watch anora, as I did in my, in my beautiful living room with my big screen tv and surround sound, in the comfort of my own home I ha, I mean, I have that too, but I still love going to the theater because the screen is even bigger you know, and a lot of people don't even have tvs.

02:32:29 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Now they're watching movies on their ipads or laptops. That's sad.

02:32:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So watch, there's a value for a big city. I sit really close, so it's better than the theater.

02:32:38 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's actually bigger than this yeah, and by the way it's the only way to watch the brutalist.

02:32:42
I am not going to go see a three hour 21 minute movie with a 15 minute intermission in a theater it was so good though it's especially honest because the cinematography of that movie beautiful, incredible on that screen, yeah well, I have a very nice qd oled tv, 78 inches or whatever only 78 leo that's big, it's close enough so that I I sit like within a few feet like this, and but the brutal the music I was, I was disappointed.

02:33:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought it should have been best picture. I really I'm glad. I'm glad that Adrian Brody won best actor because he was unbelievable and 10 million dollars they spent. That's all less than budget. Yeah, yeah, it was a budget film.

02:33:23 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Well, actually, an aura cost even less, yep they're the deep seek of Hollywood movies, that's right slash, I'm sorry, not slash.

02:33:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Film the film podcast. Yes, it's the film, because it used to be with david chen, devinder hardwar and jeff canada jeff canada, uh, who I haven't talked to in ages, I love you yeah give him my regards yeah, I shall, I shall, but yeah, go check out.

02:33:48 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Um, we did a great episode on the monkey as well, which was a hilarious, hilarious movie, the monkey. The monkey, it's like a horror. It's.

02:33:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a horror movie technically, but it is also like a really dark comedy too that's not the, that's not the uh one where the singer is a monkey and everybody else is normal better, man right better man, yeah, yeah, weird idea, weird idea. Thank you, davindra. Oh, and of course his day job. Senior editor.

02:34:15 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Engadget and the Engadget podcast. Check that out too.

02:34:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the Engadget podcast. Yes, do you. You know the Verge has recently started to have a paywall. Are you guys? Do you have a paywall on?

02:34:24 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Engadget. You know, I don't. I don't think we've really seriously considered it, because the thing is like we have been around so long producing reviews that anybody can access, so I feel like for the content we've always done this, is it the people expect this? If we do more stuff, special things, then maybe that could be paywalled eventually.

02:34:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think Engadget's great and I want it to succeed. And now that the Verge won't let me read anything.

02:34:49 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I'm really pissed off. It is wild. It is kind of wild to go back to a site and like not have access to simple reviews.

02:34:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm, I'm sitting there on the on a show a couple of not so long, a couple days ago, and I said I can't scroll, I can't scroll. And somebody said, yeah, you didn't pay for it you didn't pay for it, I mean I.

02:35:04 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I also fully support any, any publication that wants to go to subscriptions like it's hell out here, it is so rough I know world you know that's why we have both the club and advertisers, but there's no guarantee the advertisers stick around.

02:35:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean that's the problem. It's tough and of course everybody's running ad blockers. So I'm sorry and using perplexity, so you know I don't get your site much, but hey, yeah, yeah, thank you, thank you, leo. Yeah, and gadgets click on that asus review right there. I need it. I look at that. Is that yours? Seven asus zenbook a14.

02:35:39 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's super, super lightweight. Yeah, I've been reading.

02:35:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've been reading about this.

02:35:43 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It looks really nice, it's really nice, but super slow, like that's the problem oh yeah.

02:35:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's too bad, lumoresco. Maybe there's something you can do about speeding windows up. How about that? Principal ai engineering manager at microsoft? Actually brilliant thing you did, which is put python in excel mind-boggling, uh, I I don't think it gets enough attention. I think people really doesn't it really doesn't get it by an ad or something, tell the world.

02:36:10 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
You said it. Funny that you said that because the last two big things that satya has done he literally called those two things out. We still don't get enough attention. So it's unfortunate, but it's awesome. It's really awesome. I use it on a daily basis. Uh, you know whether it's you know data coming from. You know whether it's my finances or it's whatever it's. You know election data, whatever. I can just go in there and do really advanced analysis, trending. You name it using python right in excel.

02:36:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's awesome yeah, I mean a data scientist's dream, frankly. Oh yeah, really cool, lou, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it. Mike Elgin uh, of course, the gastronomad. The sun is going down and the wind is picking up in Oaxaca. I think it's time to get out and have some grasshoppers and a little uh little mezcal margarita or something.

02:36:58 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I think you're right. In fact, sometimes they put the grasshoppers in the margarita. So fun. And the salt around the edge of the phone. That's right, mezcal margaritas tend to contain those little worms that thrive on the agave plants. So delicious stuff. I love it, love Oaxaca, so much.

02:37:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just protein, just plants. So, uh, delicious stuff. I love it. It's just protein. Just think of it that way. It's all. It's all, just a little bit more protein. Go to gastronomadcom ornet I always.

02:37:24 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's gastronomadnet welcome. We have a blog there you might enjoy and, you know, send me an email if you ever want to do anything. We'd love to have you and leo, you always. Let me plug my son's thing.

02:37:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have the site ready and ready to go.

02:37:38 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I appreciate it so much. Hellochatterboxcom. Chatterbox is a smart speaker. Amazon didn't announce a smart speaker, just an assistant. He has a physical smart speaker that kids or any people of any age can make out of cardboard and the electronics that go inside. It's a makers space in a box and he's paraphrasing his unofficial slogan of move fast and make things.

02:38:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I like that.

02:38:05 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
That's a good slogan Inculcate in kids the desire to make their own electronics, to understand AI and understand the voice that's coming out of a box is just something a person made. Not, you know, it's not a person, it's not a thing. It's something that you can make and this thing glues into Wolfram Alpha, it goes into ChatGPT, it can go into all these different things, but only if the kids do it and it's totally private. There's no data exchanged. It's the only smart speaker allowed in american schools because of its privacy. So um fantastic thing for educators and parents it's such a good idea or adults who want to make their own smart speaker, that's super private.

02:38:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Such a good idea. Yeah, so, and I do think uh, you know we talk a lot about oh, there's not going to be any need for coders in a few years, right, ludy? You don't believe that we still need coders, don't?

02:38:55 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
we absolutely, absolutely. It's all about the quality of the code. I think at this point you know you're not getting that it's good.

02:39:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's good to have an AI as your little buddy, that's right. Uh, pair programming, that kind of thing right. But uh, boy, I hope kids don't start learn, stop learning how to code, even if they never. I mean, I'm not a professional coder, but it's the most damn fun ever, oh yeah but that's the whole thing.

02:39:21 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
You don't want kids growing up. Kids are going to grow up with all of these devices and we don't want them treating them, thinking about them, as a black box where the how they work is is unknowable or who cares. You want them to know how things work and to feel like they have some agency in terms of making them work the way they want them to work. We want hackers, we want, we want geeks, and so we have to teach them at a young age to be somebody's got to write this stuff.

02:39:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The ai isn't going to write it. We somebody's got to write it exactly. Hello, chatterboxcom, if you want to know more. It really is a fantastic product. Uh, I shouldn't call it a product. It's a learning tool. Uh, really, um, little raspberry pi in there and it, and then the kids code it and they learn so much about how this doesn't listen until you press the button and then it just listens until you you're done talking and then it's something that's important to demystify technology to it makes it more accessible.

02:40:15
It's not some magic thing in a box. That's right, it's accessible yeah, yeah kevin did a great job.

02:40:21
Thank you, mike, thank you davindra, thank you lou. So nice to see all of you and thanks especially to you for joining us. Uh, we do twit sunday afternoons two to to 5 pm Pacific time. That is a 2200, I'm sorry, 2100 UTC, 5 to 8 pm Eastern time. You can watch us live, as I mentioned, if you're a member of Club Twit in the Discord or on YouTube, twitch, xcom, tiktok, linkedin, facebook, kik, you know everywhere. But it's not really. That's only so you can chat with us while we're doing the show.

02:40:56
It's never really intended for you to have to listen live. It's a podcast, so you can download a copy and listen whenever you want. We have copies of the show on our website, twittv. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to this Week in Tech and you can use that to share little clips with friends and so forth, or even, as everybody does nowadays nowadays watch on your big screen tv. Apparently that's the way to watch youtube these days, uh, but the best thing to do is subscribe in your favorite podcast player. You can use audio or video or both, and you'll get it the minute we're done cleaning it up.

02:41:29
Kevin's going to get to work on this in just a little bit and we'll put it out tonight, just in time for your monday morning commute. 20 years we've been doing this, don't forget. You don't have to have been watching since the beginning, if you use, I'd love to see how you watch twit. When you watch twit, any stories you have about twit, don't forget to post them on your social media and and include us with at twit. Or you can email the leo at leofm and I'll. I'll collect those all and we're gonna have a special show on april 13th.

02:42:00 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
One more thing also, don't forget to leave us review on apple podcasts very important.

02:42:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, while you're doing that, it turns out there's people out there have been review bombing us and it's very important to us that the reviews are good. So, whatever platform you listen on Apple podcast, of course, is great. Google, whatever you use pocketcast leave us a review only if you like us. Don't leave us a bad review. Leave us a good review. Help us out here a little bit. We really appreciate it, of course. Join Club twit if you really want to help. Just $7 a month, lots of great benefits, including ad-free versions of the show at twittv. Slash club twit. Well, here we are. Once again, we've covered the world and now it's time to do as I have for the last 20 years Say goodnight to you all and hope I'll see you next week and remind you that another twit is in the can. Bye-bye.